Why Do Some Memories Survive Dementia?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Ellen Barry** (0:29)
There was this story that my dad always told about how he fell in love with my mother.
Both of them were living in Europe. It was 1956 My dad was a student, and he had become so passionate about the student uprising in Hungary, that he decided to spend his Christmas break assisting the revolution. So he and a friend made plans to travel down to the border of Hungary and Austria. My mom, who was at that point an acquaintance, tagged along. But when they got there, she stayed behind and they crossed the border into Hungary. It wasn't long before they encountered a row of Soviet tanks, at which point they decided their work here was done and retreated. Instead, they decided to leave the Hungarians to their own devices and spend the rest of their winter break skiing. Now, my dad had never been on skis, and this is characteristic that the way he approached it was essentially to get on a ski lift to the top of an alp, where I guess he imagined that he was going to learn how to ski by skiing down it, and almost immediately dislocated his shoulder, and someone called a medic, and in preparation for resetting the shoulder, the medic handed my mother a rag, soaked in chloroform, and told her to hold it over his mouth, which she did, and the way my dad always told this story, he would say, and I woke up married.
That was a story that my dad would tell even after his brain injury and dementia had really scrambled many of his memories.

**Rachel Abrams** (2:27)
From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily on Sunday. Over the course of a few years, Times reporter Ellen Barry watched as her father's memories slipped away to dementia. It was the kind of painful experience that a lot of families suffer through. Often in isolation. Today, Ellen recounts her journey with her father, and how years after his death, one neuroscientist helped to explain to her what had happened to him, and what her family had gone through.
It's Sunday, July 26th.

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**Rachel Abrams** (4:51)
Ellen Barry, welcome to the Sunday Daily.

**Ellen Barry** (4:52)
Thank you.

**Rachel Abrams** (4:54)
Ellen, you were a foreign correspondent for many years. You lived in Moscow, Delhi, London, and recently you wrote very movingly about your father and his illness and how it affected your family who, if I understand correctly, you moved back to the United States to be closer to. I want to start by having you describe what specifically prompted that move and how your father's health deteriorated from there.

**Ellen Barry** (5:19)
We had been in India for four years and in India, you realize that almost everyone lives in a joint family, like a multi-generational family. I really began to admire this arrangement and my parents were in their late 80s. They'd spent their lives in the Foreign Service moving every few years. At the time though, they were in a house in DC, retired, and we were looking for a way for them to make a transition into a new arrangement. So we came up with this plan to buy a two-family house, and the idea was that they would have some autonomy, live downstairs, my kids could have a period of time living with them. I sort of knew it was now or never because of their age, and so we did it.