If my mother gets Alzheimer’s

Then she will forget how well she raised her three sons.

If my mother gets Alzheimer’s

Then she will forget how well the café outside the tourist sites in Xian treated those three sons. (Consider the one-child policy in China.)

If my mother gets Alzheimer’s

Then she will forget the sacrifices she made, when she stopped teaching to raise the boys, when she did all their laundry and read to them every night, when she stayed with the youngest while Dad went to Iraq. (He wasn’t there for the war, but at one point ISIS troops were only 40 kilometers from Erbil.)

If my mother gets Alzheimer’s

Then she will forget the names of her grandchildren. (They are yet to be born, but my brothers and I intend to have children.)

If my mother gets Alzheimer’s

Then she will be like so many others who eventually took a path to dementia.

We are, the totality of us, forgetful of everything which we do not remember. And not all by choice. When I look at life in four dimensions, we seem to have forgotten how we will go out. That is, how we will die. We are embodied in this human structure, and there it is. Death outside of life. Death out of life.

It will be tragic, and I’m fairly certain I won’t be prepared. Writing this or even a novel about memory (which I’ve done) won’t. I do not want to pretend I have wisdom I have not yet earned.

But maybe in this preparation the tragic will not take me and my family down. And strength and a forging onward will result.

Or, if I am the one who gets Alzheimer’s (after all, this is genetic, and my grandmother was taken before I had a chance to know her), then with luck my own family will approach this end with resilience.