What to Remember When You’re Forgetting: Living Well with Memory Loss | Dr. Zaldy Tan

Zaldy Tan (0:00)

You do have that window of time where life is still vibrant, and you still enjoy your friends, and you can still travel, as you mentioned, and go to your favorite restaurants. Those are things that you shouldn't squander by denial. And those are things that I think are important in the early stages of this illness.

SPEAKER_2 (0:26)

Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living.

This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer (1:10)

Dr. Zaldy Tan opens his book with a story about two people who got the same Alzheimer's diagnosis around the same time. One kept traveling, kept seeing friends, kept living. The other more or less gave up. Same disease, same stage. Dr. Tan has spent his career as a memory specialist watching that fork in the road. And in this conversation, he explains what separates the two paths.

I lost my father to Alzheimer's and was deep in the care of Ginny's mother who also had it, as well as I worry about my own future. So I brought a lot of questions to this one, including ones about how difficult it is to care give. His book is What to Remember When You're Forgetting. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is The One You Feed.

Hi Zaldy, welcome to the show.

Zaldy Tan (2:01)

Glad to be here, Eric. Thanks for having me.

Eric Zimmer (2:03)

I'm really excited to talk with you about a really important book that you've written. It's called What to Remember When You Are Forgetting. How to Live and Thrive with Memory Loss, Alzheimer's and Other Dementias. And as I said to you in the pre-show conversation, this topic is very near to my heart. I lost my father from Alzheimer's. Ginny lost her mother from Alzheimer's. We've been involved in her mother's care really deeply. So this is the space we've spent a lot of time in. And as an aging person, it's also on my mind. And so I'm really excited to talk with you. But before we get into that, we'll start the way we do on every show, which is with a parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild. And they say in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent. They say, well, which one wins?

And the grandparent says, the one you feed.

So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Zaldy Tan (3:18)

Well, Eric, that parable really appeals to me both personally and professionally. I think I've always felt like we're all a combination of positive and negative qualities, positive and negative experiences.

And we try our best to be the better person, right? Have the positives kind of be more dominant over the negative. But there are times when the negative shows up. And we try our best to contain it and to not let it take over. And I think that always that check and balance is a healthy thing. But realizing the complexity of the human being being a combination of both positive and negative qualities are important professionally, especially as it pertains to the book. It also appeals to me because when you get dementia and you've experienced this in your family as you've said, you have less control over which wolf shows up on a day to day basis, right? Just because you have dementia doesn't mean that you lose any of these qualities positive and negative. But your day to day experience I think will be dictated by sort of internal triggers and external triggers.

The internal triggers, maybe you wake up and in your mind, especially in the moderate to late stage that someone's trying to poison me or my wife is cheating on me. And that's the internal trigger. But there might be an external trigger as well. Maybe she's wearing make up and you'll be like, why is she wearing make up, you know? So sometimes these kinds of things trigger you. And the caregiver really has a lot of control over which wolf shows up that day, right? By redirecting, by concentrating on a positive, by not feeding that wolf, if it's fear, jealousy, anger, by just making sure that they don't add to that wolf, feeding that wolf, because that's going to show up and it's going to wreck havoc on that person's day and the caregivers as well. So that parable appeals to me because it shows us that, you know, no matter who we are, whether we have dementia or other illnesses, we are a combination of these traits. And in terms of dementia caregiving, there is a lot of control that the caregiver can exert as to which wolf shows up that day.