Leave Something Behind.
When she saw us she began to cry, and she hurried toward us like we were there to rescue her from a foreign, frightening world. As we visited with her she spoke sentences that didn’t link to the other, didn’t make sense. As I looked at this old woman – wrinkles creased along her cheeks, beneath her eyes, and along her forehead – I thought how sad it was, this disease eating her away from inside, stealing away her memories and knowledge like a thief. Her lips spoke yet she didn’t. Her eyes expressed emotion yet her mind was lost. It was Alzheimer’s at its best. It was as though she was alive but not alive at all. And I thought, this is a piece of her journey. Just like the other elders in that room that were alive but not really at all. They were all on a journey, or rather reaching the end. But they were all once mentally alive, perhaps even vibrantly. They all began a journey and were still on it. Just like all of us.
When I see my grandmother in the Alzheimer’s home I find it interesting that this woman doesn’t remember her journey. Her memory has been eaten away, and when she looks in the mirror she sees those many years documented on her skin, yet she doesn’t remember how they arrived there. What’s the point of a journey? Especially if those many years are spent building oneself only to fall victim to an ugly disease that steals it away. But there is one thing Alzheimer’s nor death can ever take from a person’s journey: the footprints left along the lives of others and the way someone’s life is touched by the love, care, and insight of something more by another. The unseen beauties in life can never be erased because after all, those are the best things life has to offer. Eventually we all come to the end of our journey, often times hunched over, walking slowly, or wheeling ourselves along in a wheelchair, but it doesn’t matter because what we leave behind doesn’t follow us. It’s its own story; the only one we have that doesn’t have an ending.
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