The Grief of Forgetting

Nobody warns you that forgetting is its own kind of death. With illnesses like Alzheimer's, Lewy body dementia, or the slow cognitive erosion that follows a stroke or MS diagnosis, the person you love does not leave all at once. They leave in pieces. A name here. A face there. The story of how you met, repeated back to you like it happened to someone else, told with the mild curiosity of a stranger at a party. And the grief that comes with this is brutal precisely because there is no clean moment to point at, no funeral to organize, no casserole dishes left on the doorstep. You are mourning someone who is still breathing in the next room, who still laughs at certain things, who still reaches for your hand out of muscle memory even when your name has gone quiet in their mind. The hard truth is that most people want grief to be a single, survivable event. But this kind of loss is cumulative. It just keeps asking more of you. And the only way through it, the only sane response to watching someone's inner world slowly go dark, is to stop waiting for the loss to be over and start deciding what it means to love someone through the very specific hell of being forgotten.

Dr. Jeffrey Bone