Long Goodbye

We are all living in the society connecting ourselves to individual reality, where we recognize and memorize various information about what we see, hear, and talk including necessary sense of time and locations. Whenever we try to recognize, we collate all those things with memorized information. Therefore, the power of memorizing is one of vital keys for our life.   It’s been 15 years since she got Alzheimer’s dementia. During that period, she’s lost words gradually, and communication eventually. She seems to have forgotten even her family members, not to mention others whom she is seeing. She does not know the natural disaster occurred in the period which wiped out her native town and relatives. Her eyes are open, but seem to see nothing as if covered by a veil of thick fog. Her way of ending the life is to lose connections with the society, which are memories and recognition, until “the” last day. It’s like saying a “Long Goodbye”.   Every human, without fail, gets old and leaves the society. Every creature, without fail, follows the process of birth, growth, aging, and death. If we think ‘growth’ means a process of developing connections with environment or world, and ‘aging’ means to lose them, we may be able to say ‘dementia’ , by which we lose memories and close doors to the society one by one,  is also a process to end a life.