“When is a twitch, just a twitch, a pain just an anomaly, being tired just doing too much? And when is it the small, first step of an unraveling...”

When does it begin, the forgetting, not the usual forgetting that happens when not paying attention, or being too busy, but the forgetting that comes with Alzheimer’s disease? When did it begin for my mother, my older brother, both now gone? When did it begin for my younger brother, the nicest brother, well truthfully, the nicest one of all of us?

I know, from friends who have been touched by other diseases, and in whose genes may lurk the challenge of illness, that they wonder this too. When is a twitch, just a twitch, a pain just an anomaly, being tired just doing too much? And when is it the small, first step of an unraveling that will make itself known more dramatically at some future moment? When to pay attention? When to let it go?

“Being an adult is mostly just googling symptoms” posited a Sapling Press card that I bought the other day, finding it funny and true and oddly comforting, knowing I could send it to a host of friends who would have the same reaction.

I don’t worry about it for myself so much, not so, so much. OK, maybe the other day when I threw my purse and water bottle and dog into the car to pick up Mark at the ski shop, and left the car with my water bottle and my dog and my husband but no purse. And, I didn’t even miss it. Like I presumably would have noticed Mark or the dog or even my ever-present water bottle were missing. Much later, after the movie, Mark asked if I wanted my purse. Oh, my purse, on the floor of the back seat, where it had been for most of the day, yes, that purse, of course I wanted it. Maybe there, for an instant, a sliver, a wisp of dread passed through me as if borne on a tiny gust of wind. Here, and gone. Except that it got me to thinking about it all, the beginning of it.

My mother organized her life, tracking 9 people and their comings and goings like a boss, which she was. We were scattered across the country, getting advanced degrees (well some of us were doing that), working, marrying, having children and grandchildren, and she knew it all, tucked inside her head and recorded on her extra-large calendars. In retrospect, the first inkling of something amiss was not an inability on her part to do it all, it was a subtle change in her desire to do it. The unraveling had begun.

My older brother, sitting in the Denver airport following a family reunion in Estes Park, listening as my children explained a new card game they had learned from their cousins. The cards, however, didn’t represent what they displayed. They offered a cheat sheet to him and to me. He said he couldn’t play the game. I said that was ridiculous, he just didn’t want to. I know now that it was a cruel thing to say, but I never imagined that it might be the beginning.

My younger brother, in advance of a large family gathering, asking me many times more than usually about the details. I noticed, I felt the wisp of dread, because now I had become more alert, because somewhere in my bones I was beginning to know, that this was going to be a thing in our family and I was afraid.