Someone I know was recently diagnosed with Alzheimers. This is a disease that robs you of your cognitive abilities, especially of your memory. Memory is strange isn’t it? We’d like to think that our memory is like a dvd that stores a kind of video log of our past on it. An intact archive that we can access, if we focus. But it is really more like a film strip with still pictures on it. And it is selective. It is frustrating when our memories fail us and devastating to receive a diagnosis like Alzheimers…in part because our existence is contingent on our connection to the story of our lives; the people and places and things we have known and experienced. I am because I have a story to tell about myself, my unwritten memoir. My memory is not the only or the best reliable source of my identity, though. I count on the fact that I am part of your story too. Without a community to remember us, how would we exist?
