Contemplating darkness

My husband and I were talking about how afraid we are that we'll begin to lose our minds in another fifteen years. He thinks he'll be working for ten of them and he's angry that his retirement won't come sooner.

I think about how fifteen years isn't any time at all and what if I live fifteen years beyond the time when I begin to go senile? I bet fifteen years of relentless creeping senility lasts a hell of a long time.

Most my father's siblings suffered from dementia before dying. (All right, Alzheimer's disease. Does it matter what you call it?) Two of them are still alive, living in the care of their spouses.

For years I watched my father fold into himself, become something other, horrifying and angry and monstrous. I remember laying my head on his knee, his hand on my head and wishing that it wasn't just an automatic response on his end, that he remembered I was his daughter and that he loved me.

I don't want to be him when I get old.

I've read that dementia sets in early, when you're in your thirties or forties. That if you're going to be senile when you're in your seventies and eighties, there's nothing you can do in your fifties or sixties to prevent it from happening to you.

Whenever I have trouble thinking of a word, or find myself in a room with no idea why I went there, or when I feel compelled to respond to a situation with a particular favorite phrase or line of movie dialogue, I think, "Is this how it starts? Have I begun the long journey already? What's next?"

I know that memory lapses happen to everyone, that I'm normal, that I'm silly to panic, and besides, what good would it do?

But it's like I'm living just in front of a shadow. I'm standing in the light right now, but I can feel the creeping coldness at my back and sometimes it touches me, just briefly, and I almost know what it will be like when I'm caught by it and covered completely.