New post on mariayang.org: H/ours Lost. ⌛️
H/ours Lost.
Most people in ten countries lost an hour of time between yesterday and today in the name of Daylight Saving. (Nearly 30 nations in the Northern Hemisphere will lose an hour by the end of March.)
Among the many who woke up at a later clock time today are the seven million or so Americans who have dementia. They opened their eyes and their gazes passed over the clocks in their worlds. The faces of those with dementia may have matched the faces of analog clocks: Flat, blank, lacking emotion.
There were fewer sparks of electricity this morning in these brains speckled with scar tissue. Amyloid plaques and tau tangles are the remnants of neurons that once vibrated with vitality. The hues of their hair have faded to gray; the gray matter of their brains continues to disappear.
When they looked at their cell phones, they may have forgotten that their phones automatically adjusted the time at 2:00am. The steps of logic are missing from these brains; the staircases of reasoning have crumbled. When someone mentioned “Daylight Saving”, they sprang forward with their praxis memory, similar to “muscle memory”: They can no longer explain the steps to search the internet on their phone, but their fingers reflexively swipe and type.
Their aged fingers tapped out the word “time”, trusting that Google would orient them to this moment.
Except their query was unsuccessful. With the decay of the gray matter in their brains, their abilities to give and hold attention, to notice details, have also deteriorated. Their single word question didn’t go to Google; it went into a text message:
Time
And then again, since Google did not respond:
Time
Daylight Saving Time may have stolen one hour of our time, but dementia has stolen hours and ours from us.