Will you always have your memories?

"You'll always have those memories," I was told. One can hope so, but I'm not so sure.

"Memories are made of this" and "No, no, they can't take that away from me," lyricists write. But I have my doubts. I've lost many things in my life — dear friends, a sister, my parents, other relatives, contests and possessions — but the saddest and most devastating thing to lose is your memories, the ones you thought you'd always have. I've seen too many people, mostly the elderly, who have become disconnected from their memories, like a train that has uncoupled from its engine and is stranded forlornly. A friend told me recently about the death of his father from Alzheimer's disease, surely the saddest malady in all of human life. At the end, he did not know his son or the wife who had refused to move him into a care facility; she cared for him at home, but he did not recognize her. He did not know who that woman was.

I cherish my memories and supplement them with photographs and mementos — useful reminders of events gone by. But I fear the day when those memories fade like old photographs and become so faint that I cannot reconstruct them. Let me die with my memories intact instead of becoming an empty shell without a past.