I believe in remembering, a belief that originated from my fear of forgetting.  My fear that one day I will wake up not knowing who I am or where I am or what I am doing.  My fear that one day I will end up like the 5.1 million Americans who have Alzheimer’s today.

My family has personally been affected by Alzheimer’s which led to the decay and death of three of my relatives.  I can only remember meeting two of them; my Grandpa died when I was still learning to talk.  Because of this, my Grandma and my aunt thus became the basis of my knowledge of dementia and Alzheimer’s when I visited them in Texas years ago.

My Grandma: a puddle of useless limbs and fatty tissue, sitting with a cafeteria tray in front of her and a smile plastered upon her face.  She ate her life away happily in a nursing home with an autographed photo of George Strait in her white-walled room.  The amiable smile on her face didn’t erase the fact that she didn’t know a single fact about her life.  She didn’t remember that she had four beautiful daughters or that her husband had passed away.  She wasn’t aware that she had several healthy grandchildren, three of which stared at her in wonder at that very moment.  But she smiled and laughed and flatteringly asked my parents when they were going to get married.  Although I knew something wasn’t right, I liked my grandma.  She was beautiful in a sad way.

I was frightened of Aunt Becky.  Unlike my friendly grandma, she sat listless and cold in a chair when I saw her.  When her eyes met mine, it felt as though they bored into my soul and I wouldn’t meet her gaze again.  Yet I watched her warily; her demeanor reminded me of a corpse or a zombie.  Not a person.  When I heard of her screaming nightmares, I decided she was a monster or a ghost.  Her husband certainly looked like he had been haunted many a night.  When we left their pitiful home, my mom insisted that we would have liked Aunt Becky before Alzheimer’s ripped her mind apart.  I’d like to think we would have.

Aunt Becky died before my Grandma did.  It began when she simply stopped eating and her husband finally let her go.  She was sent to a home specifically designed to let her pass on.  Three weeks of carefully observed starvation and her body went to rest.  A little over a year later, my Grandma died in a similar manner and my mom immediately left for the funeral.  She wept over her mother’s death, but a weight had been dropped from her shoulders.  Her mother had died years ago; the puddle in the nursing home had been someone else.  Their deaths had been a relief that the suffering had finally ended and that their family could live again.

I believe in remembering.  I want to remember it all: the pain, the joy, the love, the hate… everything.  If I was there, I don’t ever want to forget it.  I find it my duty not to become a miserable lump in a callous nursing home.  It is my duty to remember.

So I have my sticky notes, my thousand pens and pencils, my agendas, my notebooks, my shoeboxes full of old trinkets, my trophies, my books, my drawings, and my useless junk in piles everywhere.  I have the four-hundred photos I took when I was in San Francisco.  I have the giant camera I choose to lug around with me to parties and hiking trips.  You may call me a packrat, but I am merely clinging onto memories.

So I believe in remembering because I don’t want to forget the day I sat with my dad in a crowded auditorium left with my teacher’s words: “Don’t expect anything.”  I want to remember the grin on my dad’s face when we left the competition with two trophies and a story to tell.  I want to be able to look back on such memories with a fondness, so I choose to remember.

I remember because forgetting is killing a perfectly wonderful memory.