Forget Me Not

"A line was, 'If I make it till 3, I'll be brain-cell free,'" he remembers. "'I'll be retarded and loud!'"

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Attempting to uncover his mother's genetic history, Seth Waller hacks into the database of a doctor running an Alzheimer's study. He proceeds to visit the study's patients at their homes, hoping they will provide insight into his mother's worsening condition.

"I feel like I've known you my whole life," his mother tells him on one of his visits to the assisted-care facility where she lives, which he calls "The Waiting Room" and she calls a hotel.

"This hotel can be so drab when I'm alone."

"I'll bet."

"I keep telling the woman that if we leave it out in the rain, everything might be lost."

"Uh-huh."

"They don't listen to a word I say, naturally, because you have to believe."

"I know, I know it."

"Right, well, at any rate. It's too late now. That's for sure. I only hope Mama isn't worried."

"Mama?" I asked.

The people from her childhood, who I knew next to nothing about, would often reappear this way, as unexplained characters from the pieces of a past life that increasingly made up the whole of her present. Soon after she was put in The Waiting Room, I had a perversely optimistic thought: that maybe if my mom forgot all the ways she had tried to make herself forget, she would be left with no choice but to remember.

"Part of the reason for writing the book was to make peace with the whole role-reversal of taking care of your parents," Block says. "It's perverse—and sickening in a way. I can't think of anything more horrifying than to watch a self you've loved your whole life disintegrate. Everything you see as a soul is stripped away, neurological component by neurological component."

Alzheimer's runs deep in the Block family, although it's hard to say exactly how deep, since it didn't even exist as a diagnosis until early in the 20th century. (The idea that dementia was a natural part of aging prevailed long after that.) But passed-down stories indicate that the disease has been in the family for generations, perhaps tattooed onto its members' genetic codes for good by the marriage of his mother's grandmother and grandfather, who were both carriers.

With bemusement and shock, his mother, Debbie, recalls being left alone to care for her grandmother when she was 13. "She was, like, wearing three dresses, and would put her purse down and make the bed up over it and then spend the rest of the day looking for her purse," she says. "Looking back, she was clearly experiencing symptoms, deep in it. We just weren't that aware of stuff back then."

Debbie's father died mysteriously when she was 18, having fallen into a monsoon drain in Singapore, where the family was living. A brilliant yet bipolar executive for Brown Paper Co., he brought untold suffering upon Debbie's mother via alcoholism and considerable time spent at a Boston psychiatric hospital. But her mother's long bout with grief largely ended when she got Alzheimer's.

"My father had given her a lot of trouble in his life, and she had forgotten about it," says Debbie of her mother's last years. "She wasn't angry about it anymore, and I was really happy to have my non-angry mother back. I hadn't seen her without that little bit of a chip [on her shoulders] in a lot of years. It was nice to see her spirit back, the spirit she probably had as a child."

She recounts their time at the family's lake cabin in 1993, a year or so before her mother's death. Driving around the area in an attempt to drop some garbage off at the dump, they got lost.

"I have a terrible sense of direction, and she couldn't find [the dump] either. We kept ending up at this place called Spiderwood Gardens where you can buy flowers. And so we said, 'Hey, as long as we're here, let's buy some flowers!' So we'd buy some flowers, get back in the car, and then we'd go off again. 'Did you say to turn right, or am I supposed to turn left?' We were just hysterical, and we'd end up back at Spiderwood Gardens again. Finally we got back to the house with all these flowers and garbage! Everyone thought we were such a hoot."

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Block believes that some Alzheimer's sufferers find comfort in their condition—bliss, even. Though he is careful to note that each Alzheimer's case is different, he believes that for many sufferers it is a relief to forget.

"In the face of tragedy, what we want is a redo," he says. "In the case of Alzheimer's, because your brain is your reality, you get to undo the sadness of your life."