👃 The Nose Knows: Smell and Memory 👃

Articles about the link between smell and memory:

• Scent therapies may help in preservation of memory (UCLA Health)

• Smell Therapy for Dementia: How Scents Can Unlock Memories and Calm the Mind (MedBox)

• Smell Therapy: Can Olfactory Enrichment Prevent Memory Loss? (Amen Clinics)

Caregiver’s Corner: Newness in the Back Yards of Our Lives

This week I’m working the video into the article. Enjoy!

It’s funny to me sometimes how my brain comes to rest on my topic for the week. Yesterday, while my partner Chava was visiting my mom in her new home, the owner of the community took her on a tour of the grounds.

One of their stops was in the garden, and Chava brought home a bunch of mint and Thai basil from the adventure. The smell of mint always puts me in mind of two things: childhood in Central New York, and my #3 favorite poem of all time—“Mint,” by Seamus Heaney.¹

Smell is a funny thing: it connects us to our past like no other sense. It’s almost as though a smell can flip a switch and move us through time in an instant. Marcel Proust, arguably the “Shakespeare” of French literature, noted this so famously and beautifully that the connection between scent and memory has become known as “the Proust effect.”

Smell and taste, as both Proust and Heaney point out, bring us back to ourselves and root us in our pasts. There’s a reason why these senses are so important to stimulate for people with dementia. They allow access to memories, places deep in the mind, that are lost otherwise.

Like music, smell and taste live in the deep waters of our Selves.

I don’t know how many times I’ve read Heaney’s poem over the years. I think it’s because it draws me back to running with friends in the New York summer. I remember a particular day when the grownups were having their grownup talk and my friends and I stumbled on a patch of mint in the yard. The smell and the taste of it…

There is something in that moment that I think I will remember long after most other things are gone. A sunny day, a child’s wonder, summer on my tongue. I wonder what my mother thinks of when the smell of mint comes, heady and defenceless, through the house from the garden.

Would you read Heaney’s poem “Mint” with me?

Heaney was an Irish poet, and I think the poem is not complete without the spoken element. Hozier, an Irish musician most famous for his songs “Take Me to Church” and “Too Sweet,” has taken to reciting this poem from memory at his concerts. If you’d like to hear it with the Irish lilt that completes it, here’s a video.

There are few statements more poignant to both life and dementia than the line “My last things will be first things slipping from me.” Alzheimer’s disease starts with the things closest too us: where we put our car keys, the name of that person we met yesterday, a friend’s birthday.

When my mom was ill in the hospital a couple weeks ago, her memory retreated further back than the date of my birth. I was my dad in her memory. She remembers me now that she has recovered. Someday I’ll be gone from her mind for good, though.

My last things will be first things slipping from me…

My father, her siblings, her parents, her music, the smell of mint and the flowers in my grandmother’s garden. Someday her consciousness, her breath.

Her last things will be first things slipping from her…

Yet let all things go free that have survived. Today, she picks mint in the garden. Today we laugh and share our secret smiles. Even when we can’t understand the words, we understand each other.

“Mint” is about a lot of things, not least of which are the politics of Irish resistance. But for me, it’s always going to be primarily about running through Ruth Keeney’s yard in the middle of Nowhere, NY, with Jeremy, Chris, and Clint—dear childhood friends—and finding the secret place of scented, minty memory on a perfect day.

The smell of mint will be one of my first-last things that I will be hard-pressed to let slip away. We say goodbye to my mother’s memories like honored guests leaving for parts unknown.

Mint still grows callow and tenacious ever, springing from the ground of my past.

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