I went to the river, once again, for my grandmother’s birthday. How interesting it is, starting to forget someone you’ve spent so much time with.. Or the memories you have left… She died of cancer, but the memories that are sticking out are about her dementia. The cancer worked its way fast, but the dementia took quite some time. How interesting it was, witnessing someone telling the same memories over and over, the memories they were left with, and the memories that are long gone, leaving this negative space like anti-matter suspended in the air. Those memories not being there anymore still had an effect; they were still there and not there, their ghosts were passing through us.
I’ve lost my other grandmother due to Alzheimer’s and that took even longer.. 8 years to be exact. How interesting it was to see how the body starts to forget. All the information on this operating system, transferred through genetics and ancestral data, all the muscles and tissues and organs and blood and electrical currents.. All of them there operating on archaic knowledge, start to shut down one by one. The body forgets memories, your face, your name, its name, how to lift a limb, how to breathe, how to pump blood. The body forgets everything.
My mom is still frightened to death because of the possibility of Alzheimer’s, and I was scared too. Now I feel it would be a bliss to forget everything before leaving this place. It is a good way to die. A soft surrender, a soft surf. Memory creates mass, it creates belonging. It creates value. If I have to leave this place, I can not have anything pulling me to its orbit. Who would want to die that way?
