In the middle of the journey of our life,

I found myself in a dark wood

For I had lost the right path

                                    The Inferno

I was never afraid of the dark. I have always had a visceral love of night time. When the sun starts to edge its way towards the horizon, I feel an energy rise from the earth, and the hairs on my arms begin to tingle. Like the radio waves that bounce off the ionosphere only at night, I feel as if I am connected to some great, unconscious power source. As a kid, I would flop on the grass, with the warm, close summer air around me, and stare at the dark silk curtain of the evening sky. I would watch as the horizon morphed through all the shades of blue and purple, like a Chagall painting, until finally settling into a deep, rich blue-black.

I was never afraid of the dark. I never needed a nightlight, never fretted about monsters hiding in the places I couldnt see. I never felt any danger when the sun went down and the lights went out.

I was never afraid of the dark.

Until I heard Tom Debaggio speak.

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I sat in my car yesterday listening to Noah Adams, the host of National Public Radios All Things Considered interview Debaggio, a kindly sounding fellow who is the grasp of the early stages of Alzheimer's. Debaggio is a plant expert and a writer, with several books on herbs to his credit. He is obviously an intelligent and articulate man, but like Dante, he finds himself lost in a dark wood. Throughout the interview, Debaggio would float in and out of lucidity, as if he were reading a novel to us, while someone was randomly turning his reading lamp on and off, forcing him to stop and wait until the light returned.  At one point, as he tried to explain his new book, he found himself floundering, drowning in a sea of words and thoughts that he could not articulate. He stopped speaking and my radio went silent. At first, I thought that the station was experiencing technical difficulties and had gone dead for a moment. Then I heard one of the interview participants stir, and I realized that Debaggio was still there, but stuck, unable to answer the simple question, "What is your book about?" The seconds ticked away in silence, two seconds, then four seconds, then six, and I realized that everyone -the people in the room with Debaggio and all of us listening in- had also fallen silent, waiting and hoping that he would be able to recover, to find his way out of the dark, if only for a moment.

          He couldn't, and finally, he said to his wife, "Tell them what the book is about..." Eventually, kindly and softly, Adams said, "I think we'll stop right there."

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My grandmother was my hero, one of those people I looked at and said, "I want to be like her." She was a world traveler. She went to China before Nixon. She somehow toured the Soviet Union while Kruschev was pounding his shoe on a UN table thousands of miles away. She saw the sun rise through the cypress trees of the Holy Land and set over the plains of Kenya. She went to India and Australia and Japan and a million other places that are only photos in a magazine to the rest of us.

Her house was a world-beat museum, a virtual trip around the globe for a wide-eyed young child. Buddist prayer wheels from Tibet next to carved fertility statues from Egypt next to clay pottery from some ancient Indian ruins of Peru. And everything crowded by books of every imaginable kind, all wrapped in the smell of baking bread and homemade lemonade.

She was a teacher and writer, with works appearing in countless publications. She spoke everywhere, from tiny churches in Florida to Big Ten campuses throughout the Midwest. She too was intelligent and articulate.

At the end of her life, she could recall riding the trolley to Anderson High School in 1915. But when she addressed me, she said gently, "Sir, I know I've met you, but I can't recall your name."

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As scientists continue to peel away the onion of the human gene, they find they can identify genetic sites that are the home of countless illnesses. They can predict if someone is a carrier of the gene that causes Huntington's Chorea, a horrific affliction that quickly drains away your very essence, leaving you a shell, hollow and quiet and alone. They can identify genes linked to breast cancer and heart disease and sickle cell anemia. And they work feverishly, looking for the site of the Alzeheimer's gene, a disease that attacks not all at once like a lightning bolt, but gradually, insidiously, like a thief in the night, who returns again and again to rob you of all that you value. Alzeheimer's is like a hole in the hull of the ship that is your being; everyone watches you sink slowly below the water line, but they are powerless to help until, eventually, you are gone. 

My grandmother vanished before our eyes. She slipped off into the darkness bit by bit by bit.  It was as if she was a character in one of the stories told by the African tribesmen she studied who believed that cameras possess magic powerful enough to steal your soul.

Science can't save us from Alzheimer's. All it can do is remind us that it is hereditary, a thread that God has woven through the tapestry of some families. I think about that sometimes when I talk to my beautiful, brilliant mother. She too is articulate and intelligent, and when she speaks, I see my grandmother's gentle eyes and expressive hands.

Sometimes, when my mother searches for the name of the author she just read, I notice how much I resemble her. I too have my grandmothers eyes and hands, and I wonder if my mother has just temporarily lost that name, a word that is on the tip of her tongue that will be remembered shortly.

            Or is it something else?

             I look at her hands. And then I look at mine. And I notice that my hands are shaking.