No Problem
I called her because I was worried. She had just visited me a few weeks prior, and I couldn't determine whether the memory loss I thought she had experienced resulted from years of depression, aging, or something worse--such as Alzheimer's. In the time since I'd seen her, I had written her a letter and sent it to her. The letter served as an outline of sorts, the symptoms I watched creep up on her like a stealthy cat: the repetition of stories, the look of confusion when I asked if she knew how to get to the store, the jumbled conversations that held no meaning. I refused to believe that these changes simply hitched a ride with the passing years and I felt compelled to plead my case. "I don't have a memory problem," she said into the phone. I would have liked to have been in the room with her when we spoke instead of 200 miles away. I imagined her knuckles, white as copy paper as she gripped the receiver, and the lines of her lips thin from the pressure of...