At the end of September I celebrated the Alzheimer’s Day of Action by pledging to use memory loss, dementia, and Alzheimer’s Disease to guide the 2013 Essays on Childhood project. You can read some of the ideas I had on this post, “How Esse Diem Purples.”

Within an hour of posting my musings, I had three complete essays from writers for the project.

These essays are not drafts, or ideas for essays; they arrived in my in-box as fully formed works. Each them moved me to tears, and continue to do so on every subsequent reading. At first I was concerned that I can’t use them in the Essays on Childhood project because they break a defining rule of EOC: All essays must be written about experiences before age 18. The essays I received are written about adult experiences, but with an interesting twist. The writing illuminates the unique pain an adult feels when caring for an older relative whose mental capacity is ravaged by Alzheimer’s Disease or dementia. The unnatural degree to which the adult caregiver much switch roles with a parent or grandparent is striking. I feel as if I’ve seen something intimate and private that maybe I did not have the right to see.

And yet . . .

And yet, these writers ask us to see it. They need us to see it. Their words reflect that people they love are slowly slipping away. These are parents and grandparents to whom a debt of gratitude can never be repaid, but the desire to repay it increases exponentially as the writers witness their loved ones’ suffering. A grieving process begins before death, and one senses that even death cannot close the wounds from this kind of protracted loss.

These essays are challenging because they ask us to share something we may not want to share. In the end, I believe what they really do is give us an opportunity as members of the human family to open our hearts and minds to one another. We have a chance to better understand how families everywhere are facing a complicated situation with no easy answers.

This week, my posts will feature the follow writers:

Tuesday: Fade to Black by Jennifer Waggener

Wednesday: The Brain Anchor by Valley Haggard

Thursday: Committed to Memory by Katy Brown

I hope you will read and share these stories, and perhaps consider writing your own essay. I have created a special essay category called Essays on Memory and Loss, and ideally a collection of these kinds of stories will become valuable education and advocacy tools for organizations like the Alzheimer’s Association.

Thank you!

Image credit: The Epoch Times