“As the whole world falls victim to a virus that runs at will across borders and into bodies, the only defense becomes going home.”

Life is drawing in on itself. I can feel it. As the whole world falls victim to a virus that runs at will across borders and into bodies, the only defense becomes going home. Going home. Remaining at home. Learning what it means to be at home.

As I have been writing this story of remembering and forgetting, I have often reflected on how, in running its course, unabated by science or medicine, Alzheimer’s unfolds in a backwards motion. Dementia finds us where we are and then relentlessly returns us to our beginnings and in the process the mind and the body forget almost everything they have ever learned. Our loved ones return from whence they came, they exit this world as they entered it, relying on our deepest connection, our eternal connection, to know love and comfort and some measure of peace.

This pandemic is forcing us back to that same eternal connection. It forces us to see that we are all fundamentally the same despite how our genes have rendered our features, our bodies, our languages and our cultures. We are bone and muscle and tissue and nerve and cell and atom. We love and fear and hope and laugh and cry and work and play. We rise and we fall, we succeed and we fail, we live and then we die.

Like dementia, current science offers nothing to protect us from this epidemic, and medicine can only offer supplemental support to our bodies, offering a little more time for our own internal systems to fight the fight. Eat, sleep, move, be calm. This is the prescription for Alzheimer’s, and it, for now, is the prescription for Covid-19. Unlike Alzheimer’s, with this virus our minds are untouched, we live fully aware of the threat, alert for the symptoms, sequestered with our fear, waiting for our fate, praying for deliverance, hoping for a breakthrough; returning to our homes to eat and sleep and move and try to be calm and now, to pray. Most of us will never forget this moment in time, though I fear many will wish they could.

The universal fear of getting Alzheimer’s is tied up in the completeness of the forgetting, the reality that I will remember nothing of my life, the good times and the bad, those I loved and those whom I found myself not loving, my success and my failures, what I have learned and that which I failed to grasp; all of it gone. And yet I yearn, if I am honest, for selective forgetting; erasing the painful, effacing regrets, abolishing failures, sweeping away losses. The truth is that it all lives on no matter how I try to relegate the dark side of my life to some distant corner of my psyche. It lives on in me, housed in the recesses of my body, the deepest crevices of my physical being.

Now, I take refuge in that knowing for it is in those same deep autonomic repositories of memory that I learned to find those I love that otherwise seemed to be disappearing in front of my eyes. When I can no longer reach them in the ways we had grown accustomed to, I believe that the sound of my voice, the lilt of loved music, the gentle touch of my hand, a familiar smell, the cadence of a walk, connects to that sacred cache. And I am comforted; I pray they are as well.