Apparently not, without a visible (and potentially breaking) change of policy:
Policy regarding taking over Hackage packages
It does not give instructions for what to do if the maintainer can be contacted, doesn’t want to maintain the package, but also doesn’t want anyone to take it over.
With the cryptonite family of packages in particular [which includes memory], the original author has taken the position that:
people may have used the package because they trusted the author,
the author, being no longer involved, can’t evaluate any new maintainer to be a suitable recipient of that trust,
therefore, no ownership transfer maintains / deserves the trust that the package may have originally carried.
(thanks to those who pointed out this connection I missed). Hence my prior post . But the lack of maintenance of basement (as noted by Bodigrim ) now seems to be the bigger “can o’worms” …