The True Monster

 There is one monster that stalks every one of us. Death, you'll say, yes, of course, death is his brother, but old age is the monster. 

     --Time Shelter, Georgi Gospodinov 

Here is a quote that unsettles me, for it is quite true. Death itself is neither monstrous nor fearsome. It is the run up to death that is. Death is quite natural, we are doing it from the time we are born. It is our inescapable destination and will be followed either by new life or nothing, neither of which is dreadful, for the one is continuum and the other is simple oblivion (one cannot dread a thing if one is oblivious). But what must we go through to get to the other side of life in the body? That's the dreadful thing to contemplate.

What happens when memory begins to withdraw? First you forget individual words, then faces, rooms. You search for the bathroom in your own home. You forget what you've learned in this life. It's not much anyway and will run out soon. And then, in the dark phase, as Gaustine calls it, comes the forgetting of that which accumulated before you even existed, that which the body knows by nature, without even suspecting it. Now, that's what will turn out to be fatal.

                 Time Shelter, Georgi Gospodinov

 The gradual loss of language. Yes, I know. Searching for the elusive word that balances forever out of reach on the edge of one's own tongue. Where can it have gone? I know the meaning of the word that I want, the general shape of the word, and yet I cannot utter the word. Once was the time when I would flip through a thesaurus in search of more sophisticated choices for a simple word. Now I search for the simple word itself by pouring through a series of possible approximations. I've not yet misplaced my own bathroom. But after all, I live in a one room apartment. I have, however, dreamed of forgetting where the bathroom is in some other house, some home of mine in the past. 

In the final stage of Alzheimer's disease, my mother finally expired when she forgot how to breathe. That's the way the doctor put it. She simply forgot how to breathe. 

But really, hadn't she left, for all practical purposes, long beforehand?