At 62 I Lost a Simple Word Mid-Story. I Paused and My Whole Family Waited. Then My Friend Asked How Many Eggs I Use.

It was a Sunday, and the whole family was at our house for dinner. That only happens about once a month now that the kids are grown.

My grandson Eli, who's eight, asked for the story about the camping trip where his grandpa fell in the lake. I've told that story maybe fifty times, and I know where every laugh goes.

I got to the part where Tom is standing waist-deep in the water, holding the coffee over his head to keep it dry.

I went to say what he was holding it in, and the word was gone.

I could see it, the green one with the dent in the lid that's still in our garage. I knew exactly what it was, and I couldn't get the word out.

The table went quiet while everyone waited for me.

I said, "You know, the green thing, for coffee," and Eli said, "A thermos, Grandma?" Everybody laughed, and I laughed too, and I finished the story.

But I saw my daughter look at her husband. It was a quick look, and I don't think she meant for me to see it.

The word came back on its own two hours later, while I was rinsing plates at the sink. That's how it always went: the word showed up once nobody was waiting for it.

If you're in your fifties or sixties and a word you've used all your life has gone missing while people waited, I wrote this for you.

What I found finally made sense of it. I wish someone had explained it to me a year sooner.

My name is Diane. For twenty-six years I worked the front desk of an elementary school in Knoxville, and I knew about four hundred kids by name, and most of their parents too.

At home I was the family's memory. I knew every birthday and every phone number by heart, and I never once took a grocery list to the store.

I retired two years ago. Now I watch Eli and his little sister two days a week, and I've been in the same book club for fourteen years.

I tell you all that because being sharp was a big part of who I was. People came to me when they couldn't remember something.

So the thermos didn't feel small to me. It wasn't my first slip, just the first one my whole family saw.

A few months before, I ran into a neighbor at the grocery store, a woman I've known for twenty years, and her name just wasn't there.

I said "Hi, honey," asked about her knee, and spent the whole drive home trying to get her name back. It was Gail.

I kept walking into the pantry and forgetting why. I started writing grocery lists for the first time in my life, and then I left them on the counter.

After the thermos, I started writing each missing word on a sticky note and putting it inside the cupboard door where I keep the mugs.

I think I wanted proof of how often it happened.

Within a few weeks there were nine notes on that door: thermos, Gail, colander, the actor in a movie Tom and I had just watched, and five more.

I also got quieter, and I didn't notice it until other people did.

At dinner I let Tom tell the stories, even the ones that were mine.

At book club I stopped offering to lead the discussion. Leading means talking a long time without notes, and that's where the words went missing.

Every pause felt like the whole room could see it, so I said less.

My daughter called one evening and asked, "Mom, are you okay? You seem quiet lately." I told her I was tired.

And every time a word went missing, I wondered what it meant. I didn't ask anybody, because I didn't want them wondering too.

I didn't know this back at that dinner table.

A University of Michigan poll asked people aged 50 to 64 about their memory, and two out of three said it was worse than when they were younger.

So if this is happening to you, you're in the biggest group there is.

Odds are a couple of people at your own table have had the same pause. They're just keeping quiet about it, the way I was.

Do any of these sound like you?

If even one of them does, keep reading. What Ruth told me explains why it happens.

I did what you're supposed to do. I started the crossword every morning, put a brain-game app on my phone and went to bed earlier.

I also bought that memory pill from the TV ads and took it for two months.

When I brought it up at my checkup, my doctor said it was normal at my age and told me to get more sleep.

The sticky notes kept going up on the cupboard door.

Ruth and I walk the greenway along the river on Tuesday mornings. She's sixty-six, a retired bookkeeper, and she reads every label in the store and every article her doctor hands her.

One Tuesday I finally told her about the thermos and the sticky notes. I expected her to say it happens to everyone.

Instead she asked me how many eggs I eat.

I laughed and said maybe two, on Sundays. "Then you're like most women," she said. "You're short on choline."

When I asked what that was, she spent the next mile explaining it.

Afterward I made her write it all down in the car. What follows is mostly her list, plus what I read for myself once I got home.

Choline is a nutrient your body only makes a little of, so most of it has to come from food.

Eggs have the most of any everyday food. Meat, fish and soybeans have some too.

Your brain uses choline for two jobs at once.

First, it builds the soft outer wall of every brain cell out of choline.

Second, it turns choline into the messenger that carries a thought, a name or a word from one cell to the next.

With plenty coming in, both jobs get done. The trouble starts when there isn't enough for both.

The National Institutes of Health sets the daily amount for women at 425 mg of choline, about three eggs' worth.

The average American woman gets 278 mg. That leaves her about one egg short, every single day.

I was eating two eggs on Sundays and none the rest of the week, so most days I wasn't anywhere close.

This was the part that got me.

When researchers gave younger and older adults the same dose of choline, it rose about the same in everyone's blood.

But in the brains of the people over 60, it rose only about a quarter as much.

So even on a day you eat well, less of it gets where it's needed. More eggs would help some, but past 60 they only get you part of the way.

Your brain keeps sending messages even when choline runs low.

It goes to the one place it already has some, the walls of its own cells, and pulls it out to keep the words moving.

Scientists have an ugly name for that: autocannibalism.

Ruth said to picture a house where the woodpile has run out, so you start pulling boards off the porch to keep the stove going.

It was the first explanation in a year that fit what was happening to me.

The word was always still in there. My brain was just taking longer to send it.

If your words have started arriving late, this is one reason it happens after 50, and it's one you can do something about.*

Then Ruth got to the part she was saving. "Look for one line on the label," she said. "Citicoline, 500 milligrams."

Citicoline is a form of choline. After you swallow it, your body splits it into two parts, and both parts reach your brain.

Your brain uses them for the same two jobs: its cell walls and its messengers.*

And 500 mg a day is the dose that was studied in healthy adults 50 to 85. In other words, people our age.

That night I took my memory pill out of the cabinet, put on my reading glasses and read the back of the bottle.

There was no citicoline on it, and no choline at all, after two months of taking it every day.

If you've done the puzzles or bought a pill from a TV ad like I did, you did something sensible. None of it gave your brain the choline it was borrowing from itself.

The next morning I went looking, with Ruth's line written on an index card next to my laptop. It took me longer than I expected.

Most bottles with citicoline at 500 mg had nothing else in them.

The ones with a longer list either left it out or hid it in a "proprietary blend." That's one number for the whole mix, so you can't tell how much of anything is in there.

The one I ended up with is called Luma Brain, from Luma Nutrition.

It says "with citicoline" right on the front. On the back, the label lists citicoline at 500 mg with every other dose printed under it, and no blend.

It's two capsules a day, taken together with breakfast.

My first box came on a Thursday. I take two capsules every morning with breakfast and keep the bottle next to the egg carton, which Ruth thinks is very funny.

I took all nine sticky notes off the cupboard door. In their place I put up one new note that says "2 with breakfast."

For the first few weeks I didn't notice much, and I kept taking it anyway.

Somewhere around week six, I realized I hadn't put a new note on that door in weeks.

Then it was my turn to host book club, and I offered to lead the discussion for the first time in a year.

I talked for most of an hour without notes, and nobody had to finish a sentence for me.

The next Sunday the family came over, and Eli asked for the camping story. I told him the whole thing.

When I got to Grandpa in the lake, Eli yelled "Thermos!" right along with me, and the whole table cracked up, me included.

It felt so good to be the one telling the story again. My daughter caught my eye across the table, a different look this time, and she smiled.

I'm about two months in now, and the guarantee gives me 90 days, so I still have a month to change my mind. I already know I won't.

If you've read this far, you probably have your own thermos.

Maybe it's a name at church, or a word in the middle of a story your grandkids have heard a dozen times. Maybe you've started letting someone else do the talking.

Ruth's whole list fits on one index card.

Your brain uses choline to build its cells and to carry your words.

Most women eat about one egg short of it every day, and after 60 less of it reaches the brain, so your brain borrows from its own cell walls.

Citicoline at 500 mg, the dose studied in adults 50 to 85, gives your brain choline in a form it uses for both jobs.*

Check the label on whatever you're taking now. If citicoline at 500 mg isn't on it, that's where I'd start.