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I forgot a woman's name at the Publix on Forest Drive and sat in my car for 10 minutes afterward. It was a Wednesday morning, around 10:30, and I was in the produce section pinching avocados the way my mother taught me to. I had my list in my pocket. I had nowhere to be. I was the most relaxed I'd been all week, and that's the part that's important, because what happened next happened to a relaxed woman in good spirits, which is not the version of me you'd expect to fall apart. A voice said, "Patricia." I turned around. The woman was in her mid 40s. Blonde hair pulled back. Cream colored cardigan. A toddler in the cart who had to be a grandchild, because she was too put together for a young mother and her face had that 40-something softness. She said my name like we were friends. She smiled at me the way you smile at somebody you've shared something with. She said, "Oh my goodness, it's been so long. How are you?" And she came around the avocado bin with her arms half open, the way somebody does when they're going in for the hug but they're checking to see if you want one too. And I stood there with an avocado in my hand and I had absolutely no idea who she was. I knew I knew her. I knew it deep in some part of me that wasn't connecting to whatever part is supposed to know names. Her face was familiar in a way that made it worse. If she'd been a total stranger I could have just said, "I'm sorry, I think you have me confused with someone else." But I knew her. We had history. And the history was just gone. I did what you do. I hugged her. I said, "Oh my goodness, it's been forever. How are you?" I asked about her, generally, in the kind of vague way you can ask without giving anything away. She told me her oldest had gotten into Clemson. I made the appropriate sounds. She told me she'd retired from the district 2 years ago. I felt something cold move down my back, because if she'd been with the district, I had almost certainly known her name as well as I knew the names of my own children. She talked for about 4 minutes. I nodded. I smiled. I asked about her husband, generically. She told me about her husband, whose name I also did not retrieve. She told me about a vacation they were taking. She said she'd been meaning to call me. She said we should get coffee. And then she said, "Well, I'll let you finish your shopping. So good to see you, Patricia." She hugged me again. She wheeled her cart away. The toddler waved at me over her shoulder. I stood there with the avocado in my hand. I put it in my cart. I picked up a different one. I put that one in my cart too. I walked over to the bananas. I stood by the bananas for what felt like 2 minutes. My heart was going. My hands had that buzzing feeling you get when you've had too much coffee. I left my cart there. I walked out of the Publix without buying a single thing. I got in my car. I put my hands on the steering wheel. I sat there in the parking lot with my hands on the wheel and the air conditioning off and the August sun coming through the windshield, and I tried to remember her name. It didn't come. I sat there for 10 minutes. It still didn't come. I drove home, and I made it almost to my driveway, and I had to pull over on Heyward Street because I was crying. Her name was Linda Coker. I remembered it 3 days later, on a Saturday morning, while I was watering the ferns on the front porch. Just like that. The name fell into my head out of the air. Linda Coker, the head of the special education department at Carver Elementary, who I had worked with for 11 years, who had organized my retirement luncheon in 2019, who had given me a framed photograph of all the teachers signed on the matte that's hanging in my office right now. Linda Coker. I sat down on the porch step with the watering can in my hand and I cried again, but this time for a different reason. Relief, partly. Shame, mostly. Because Linda's name should not have taken 3 days. I'm Patricia Whitman. I'm 63 years old. I was the principal at Carver Elementary School in Columbia, South Carolina, for 17 years before I retired in 2019. I have a master's degree from the University of South Carolina. I have served on the boards of 2 different community education non-profits. I gave a 25 minute keynote address at a state principals' conference in 2014 without any notes. My memory has been a piece of professional equipment for my entire adult life, and the equipment is starting to fail. I want to tell you something I have not told my husband or my sister or my best friend Marjorie, which is that the Publix wasn't the first time. It was the time I couldn't deny anymore. But it wasn't the first. A month before the Publix, I'd been at a doctor's appointment and the front desk woman asked me my date of birth and there was a half second where I could not retrieve it. Half a second. Long enough to feel it but not long enough that the woman noticed. I told her my birthday and she typed it in and the appointment went on. Two weeks before the Publix, I'd been telling my husband Ed a story about something that had happened at the bank, and I forgot the word for the form they make you sign. Just the regular form. I sat there in my own kitchen looking at my own husband and said, "And so I had to sign the, the, you know, the thing with the lines." The word "deposit slip" came back to me about a minute later. Ed didn't say anything. He didn't make a thing of it. He just nodded along like nothing had happened. It's the little things that scare you the most. The big things you can pretend are flukes. The little things tell you the truth. I made myself a list one night about a week after the Publix. I sat at my desk in the room that used to be my home office and I wrote down every time in the previous 6 months I could remember something not coming when it was supposed to. I wrote down 23 incidents. 23 in 6 months. The day I forgot the gas station was on the right instead of the left. The afternoon I called my niece Susan by my sister's name. The morning I couldn't think of the word for the spice that goes in pumpkin pie until I'd been standing in front of the spice rack for 4 minutes. Nutmeg. Of course nutmeg. 23 incidents that I could remember. I sat at my desk with my list and I thought, "Patricia, this is the thing you don't want to think about." My mother had developed dementia in her 70s. I had watched it happen. I had been in the assisted living facility the day she'd called me Margaret, which was her sister's name, who had been dead for 22 years at that point. I had held her hand and said, "Mom. I'm Patricia. I'm your daughter." And she had looked at me with those wide bright eyes and said, "Of course, sweetheart," in the way she said it when she was just going along with what I was telling her without knowing it. I'd told myself I was going to do everything I could not to be her at the end. And here I was, 63 years old, with 23 incidents on a piece of paper in front of me. I called my doctor's office the next morning. I told the woman on the phone that I wanted to talk to Dr. Mehta about memory concerns. She put me down for 3 weeks out. The 3 weeks felt like 3 years. In those 3 weeks I read. I want to tell you what I read because the reading is what changed my life. I want to be clear about something first. I am not telling you reading saved me from dementia. I am not telling you anything will or won't save you from dementia. I am not a doctor and I do not know what your future or my future holds. What I am telling you is what I learned about my brain in those 3 weeks, that nobody had ever sat me down and explained, and what I started doing about it. The first thing I learned was that the brain is the single most energy hungry organ in the body. By a wide margin. Your brain is about 2 percent of your body weight and it uses about 20 percent of your daily energy. It is a furnace. And the energy that powers that furnace is produced by little structures inside every brain cell called mitochondria. I had not thought about mitochondria since 11th grade biology. I went and read about them like I was studying for a test. Mitochondria produce the energy that runs every cell in your body, but they're especially critical to brain cells. Your neurons fire constantly. They are working all day, every day. They need a constant, reliable, clean supply of energy. And the structures that produce that energy take damage over time. The byproducts of normal energy production create a kind of oxidative stress, and that stress accumulates inside the mitochondria year after year. Researchers have a name for the result. They call it mitochondrial dysfunction. And one of the most studied areas in neuroscience right now is the connection between mitochondrial dysfunction and exactly the kind of slow, frustrating, scary cognitive changes I had been writing on my list. The forgotten names. The lost words. The half second pauses. It's not always dementia. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't. But the underlying mechanism, the mitochondrial side of it, is something researchers are taking very seriously, and the reason is that when you understand the mechanism you start to see the openings. You start to see the places where the body might be supported in doing what it's been doing all along. You start to see that "this is just aging" is not the only story available. I read deeper. I read for hours every night that month. Ed would come in and ask if I was coming to bed and I'd say give me 20 more minutes, and 90 minutes later I'd still be at the desk with the lamp on. The thing that kept coming up was a compound called urolithin A. Urolithin A is something your body produces when your gut bacteria break down certain dietary polyphenols. The richest source of the precursors that get converted into urolithin A is pomegranate. Specifically the concentrated polyphenols in the peel and the rind. And the reason urolithin A has gotten so much research attention recently, including a 2024 study out of the University of Copenhagen that I want to be careful with because the research is still developing and a lot of it is still preclinical, is that urolithin A appears to support a process called mitophagy. Mitophagy is the body's own housekeeping system for clearing out damaged mitochondria so that newer, healthier ones can take their place. It's a process the body has been running for as long as you've been alive. And when it's running well, the cells, including the brain cells, have access to cleaner energy. When researchers have looked at urolithin A specifically in the context of brain mitochondria, the early signals have been interesting enough that they're now planning clinical trials in humans with cognitive issues. I want to say it again. I am not telling you this is a cure for anything. I am not a doctor. The research is still developing. What I'm telling you is that there is a mechanism being studied that addresses a real biological process that I, at 63 years old, have likely been losing ground on for the last 20 years. I read about pomegranate research in other areas too. There have been studies on pomegranate extract and memory. A small double-blind study of middle aged and older adults showed improved verbal and visual memory after 4 weeks of pomegranate juice. A trial at UCLA in adults aged 50 to 75 looking at pomegranate extract found positive signals in cognitive performance at multiple checkpoints. A 2024 trial in 80 individuals dealing with mild cognitive concerns found significantly better outcomes with pomegranate seed oil supplementation alongside a Mediterranean diet compared to diet alone, across global cognition, verbal episodic memory, and processing and executive functions. I sat at my desk and I read all of this and I thought about Linda Coker. I thought about my mother. I thought about the form at the bank. I thought about 23 incidents in 6 months on a piece of paper. And I ordered a bottle of Alevia. Alevia Pomegranate. 2 capsules a day. Made in the US. The concentrated extract from the peel where the active compounds are most highly concentrated. 30 servings per bottle. A 90 day money back guarantee, which I noticed and which mattered to me because at 63 years old I am tired of giving companies my money for products they don't stand behind. I went to the doctor 9 days after I ordered the bottle. I had the bottle in my purse. Dr. Mehta is a thoughtful woman. She listened to me for almost 25 minutes. I told her about the Publix. I told her about the list. I told her about my mother. She gave me a cognitive screening test in the office that day, the kind they give you to establish a baseline. She said my results were normal for my age and education. She told me to come back in 6 months and we'd do it again. She did not dismiss me. I want to be clear about that. She took me seriously. She just also told me that what I was describing was within the range of normal age related cognitive change, and that there was nothing she could prescribe at this point. I asked her what she thought about pomegranate extract. She paused. She said, "Patricia, there's some interesting early research. It's not at the level where I would prescribe it. But as a supplement, I don't have any concerns about it. Make sure your supplements and your medications don't conflict and let me know what you're taking." I told her about the Alevia. She wrote it in my chart. I started taking it the next morning. I want to tell you about the last 4 months because the last 4 months are why I'm writing this. The first 3 weeks I didn't notice much. I want to say that honestly. I think I was looking too hard. I'd find myself, in the middle of a sentence, asking myself "did that come faster than it would have a month ago." And the answer was usually I don't know. The brain is bad at noticing what it's doing. Around week 5, something else started happening that I want to tell you about because it surprised me. I was sleeping better. I hadn't realized I was sleeping badly until I was sleeping better. Ed and I had been having those middle of the night moments where one of us would be awake at 3 AM and the other would notice and we'd both end up reading on our phones for an hour. They had become so normal we'd stopped commenting on them. Around week 5 I noticed I'd slept through, 4 nights in a row. By week 7, I noticed I was reading more. I had been a 4 books a year reader for the last 3 years, which was a disgrace for a person who had run a school for 17 years. I would pick up a book and read 6 pages and lose interest. I started a book in late September and finished it 9 days later. Then I started another one. By the end of November I'd finished 4 books, which used to be my pace in college. By week 10, I was teaching a Sunday school class for adults. I want to be careful, again. I don't know what's causing what. I'm not telling you the pomegranate is doing all of it. I'm telling you that 4 months ago I was a woman who left her cart at the Publix and sat in her car crying, and as of last Sunday I stood in front of 22 adults at First Presbyterian and taught for 50 minutes from notes I had largely committed to memory, and I did not lose a single word, a single name, or a single thread. Yesterday morning I ran into Linda Coker again. This time it was at the Earth Fare on Devine Street. She was coming out of the coffee bar with a paper cup. She saw me at the same time I saw her. I said, "Linda. Hello." Her name came up out of me as easily as the next breath. She smiled. She came over. She hugged me. She said, "Patricia, oh my goodness, I've been thinking about you. Did you ever want to get that coffee?" We sat down at one of the little tables right there in the Earth Fare and we had coffee together for 35 minutes. I asked about her daughter at Clemson, by name, because her daughter's name is Caroline. I asked about her husband Tom, by name, because that is also a name I am supposed to know. I talked about my own grandchildren. I told her about Ed's retirement project of restoring a 1972 Mustang. I told her about the Sunday school class. She told me I looked great. She said, "You look like you again, Patricia." I drove home from Earth Fare and I sat in the driveway for a minute with the car off. I thought about the Publix. I thought about the 10 minutes I'd spent in this exact same car trying to summon a name that wouldn't come, in this exact same driveway with the exact same August sun coming through the exact same windshield. I sat there and I felt, for the first time in a very long time, like the woman I had been was not gone. She had just been buried under a kind of fog I didn't have a name for, and the fog was lifting. Some of it because I was paying attention. Some of it because I was sleeping. Some of it, I believe, because the brain in my head was finally getting a piece of support it had been quietly asking for for years. If any of this sounds like the woman you are or the husband or the mother or the friend you love, I'd just say take a look at it. Alevia Pomegranate is 2 capsules a day, made in the USA, with the concentrated extract from the peel of the fruit where the actual compounds that matter actually live. It comes with a 90 day money back guarantee. You try it for up to 90 days, and if it's not the right fit for you, you ship the bottle back and they refund every penny. That guarantee is part of why I ordered it. I was tired of buying things that came with no exits. The guarantee told me the company believed in what they were doing. And the way I felt at the Earth Fare with Linda Coker yesterday told me they were right to. I think about my mother more often these days. I think about her face when she called me Margaret. I think about how much of her had been quietly slipping away from her for years before anybody had a word for what was happening. I am not going to be her at the end. I am not telling you that with pride. I am telling you with the kind of careful, quiet hope that comes from being a 63 year old woman who has, for 4 months now, had her words again. Her names again. Her sleep again. Her books again. Her Sunday school class again. I had been losing pieces of myself in small increments without knowing it. I am getting some of them back. The name Linda Coker came up out of me as easily as the next breath. That is not a miracle. It is something the body has been doing all along, and it just needed a little support to do it again. 👉 https://alevia.com/pom/5 P.S. I told my best friend Marjorie about Alevia about 6 weeks after I started. Marjorie is 62 and a retired social worker. She had been having her own version of what I'd been having. She started taking it in November. Last week she called me and said she'd remembered the title of a book she'd been trying to remember for 8 months. It came to her in the shower. She had stood in the shower with the water running and she had cried. We are both at an age where we cry about things like that, and we are not embarrassed about it. P.P.S. About the 90 day money back guarantee. It's real. If you give Alevia Pomegranate an honest try for up to 90 days and it's not the right fit for you, you ship the bottle back to them and they refund every penny. There's no fight. There's no fine print I've been able to find that contradicts it, and I am a retired school principal who reads things carefully. Most of what doctors and pharmacies hand out doesn't come with any guarantee at all. Alevia stands behind theirs, which says something to me about a company. It should say something to you too. P.P.P.S. The thing I would say to anyone reading this who has been making lists like the one I made is don't wait. I waited 4 years before I made my list. I had been losing ground for at least that long, and probably longer, before the Publix forced me to admit it. The brain doesn't wait for you to be ready. The brain keeps doing what it's doing whether you're paying attention to it or not. Pay attention now. Today is a better day than the day you walk out of a grocery store without your cart. P.P.P.P.S. Ed has been taking it too for about 2 months. He hasn't said much about it. He's not a man who says much. But last Thursday at dinner he said, "Patty. I was looking for my reading glasses for 20 minutes this afternoon and then I remembered I'd left them in the garage. I haven't been able to do that in 3 years." He kept eating his pork chop. He didn't make a thing of it. I sat across the table from him and I made a thing of it inside my chest where he couldn't see, and I held on to that little sentence the way you hold on to a small bird that's flown into the house. Gently. Carefully. Hoping it will stay. 👉 https://alevia.com/pom/5