I’m not afraid of any of the regular things. Spiders, snakes, heights, no problem. I’m not afraid of enclosed spaces, or needles, or thunderstorms; I’m not afraid of flying. I have some irrational paranoid fantasies, but they’re all silly and small, and none of them keep me up at night. What does scare me, what I worry about more often than I should, is getting old. Or being old, I guess. I’ve never been wild about feeling powerless, and to me aging just seems like a steady—or in some tragic cases, sudden—loss of control.

A friend of the family is in town for the holidays and she and her mother came over to visit today. Robin is my mom’s age and her mother, Lois, is in her 80s. Her health is okay, generally, but her memory has started to seriously deteriorate. She repeats thoughts, asks the same questions over and over again, and forgets most of what she does during the day a few minutes after she’s done it. In between normal conversation about Christmas and the snow, Lois asks hesitantly who the people in the room are. This happens a couple times. She recognizes her daughter and most of the time remembers my mother, but when Robin left the room, briefly, you could see the anxiety start to work up in Lois’s face. She pointed into the kitchen at the coat rack and nervously asked if there was a man standing in the shadows by our back door.

This is what I’m afraid of. Not the hospital, or the pain, or dying. Her subtle fear and tentative uncertainty send chills down the backs of my arms. I realize everyone dies, and a lot of people grow old before it happens, but that provides no solace. Most of my life so far has been spent learning, acquiring and developing functions and skills and it terrifies me to think that one day, that process will begin to reverse. That I might remember what it was like to recognize my family, and realize I no longer can. That I might not understand. That I’ll forget.

I move forward. Decidedly forward. Sometimes stubbornly, blindly forward, but forward nonetheless. I value history, but I don’t believe in regret. Retrospection is only as useful as the insight it brings. So then what happens when there’s nowhere else to go? The progress stops and you begin to backslide…

There’s no comfort here. I’m not afraid of regular things.