Forget Me Not

Some Forgetting readers take issue with this idea, which they believe plays out through a fantasy parallel world in the book called Isidora, a golden land "without memory, where every need is met and every sadness is forgotten." Residents of Isidora may fall in love with the same person a thousand different times, and when hungry, they feast, "briefly living only for the pleasure of eating." The legend of Isidora is described to Seth and Abel by their mothers, who learned about it from their parents.

On his Web site WordSmith, amateur book critic Sam F. Smith, who says he has a close family member with Alzheimer's, calls the description of Isidora "particularly inappropriate for the subject matter. It's hard to believe that people under threat of developing [Alzheimer's] would envision such a place as a relief from their disease—it seems more like a nightmare. It is memory that makes us human—without it, we are little more than animals."

Jonathan Franzen echoed similar sentiments when describing his father's dark, last years with Alzheimer's in a 2001 New Yorker article called "My Father's Brain." "I wish he'd had a heart attack instead," Franzen wrote. (Block nonetheless cites the essay as influential in the creation of his book.)

But another way to understand Isidora is not as an imagined respite for the afflicted, but as a source of comfort for unafflicted loved ones. Says Clegg: "If you're watching somebody fade away and not remember you—while you remember every single heartbreak and triumph that you've had with that person—it seems natural to me to then imagine a place where memory doesn't exist. If you're the one left, memory is a burden, so I think it's natural to imagine a place where one would be unencumbered by that."

Block's opinion on this subject was informed by a visit to Tilton, New Hampshire, to see his great-uncle Ralph, a former Navy fighter pilot who killed a comrade during a World War II-era training exercise because of circumstances unclear. Ralph was quickly cleared by the Navy and soon crashed again, killing two more men. Ralph now lives in the Alzheimer's unit of a veteran's home.

"While there is something poignantly, almost unbearably sad about an 84-year-old man begging for his parents, to think of Ralph as neurologically returned to his mental life as a 3-year-old is to realize the potential blessing of Alzheimer's disease," Block writes in the original version of "Uncle Ralph's Rapture." "Alzheimer's has accomplished for Ralph what many of us dream of in the slow, rippling wake of tragedy: it has bent the rules of time and space and returned him to innocence. Ralph has killed three men, failed in every serious career attempt, lost his family, and spent the majority of his life as a hermit, and yet if happiness and contentment are the point, then—at the present—it would be difficult for me to think of anyone succeeding more thoroughly than Ralph."

Block himself seems to harbor little worry about his own potential descent into the clutches of the disease. The idea of "retrogenesis"—essentially, returning to a childhood state—actually brings him an unlikely bit of comfort.

"My childhood was pretty happy, so..." he says with a laugh. "But I'm sure I'll feel differently when I'm 60 and I have a family; I'll be upset for them. But I don't fear it any more than I fear dying. I think Alzheimer's is both a blessing and a curse. Not that I want to develop the disease, but if I do, I believe there is a blessing to it."