Forget Me Not

"Part of the reason for writing the book was to make peace with the whole role-reversal of taking care of your parents," Block says. "It's perverse—and sickening in a way. I can't think of anything more horrifying than to watch a self you've loved your whole life disintegrate. Everything you see as a soul is stripped away, neurological component by neurological component."

Alzheimer's runs deep in the Block family, although it's hard to say exactly how deep, since it didn't even exist as a diagnosis until early in the 20th century. (The idea that dementia was a natural part of aging prevailed long after that.) But passed-down stories indicate that the disease has been in the family for generations, perhaps tattooed onto its members' genetic codes for good by the marriage of his mother's grandmother and grandfather, who were both carriers.

With bemusement and shock, his mother, Debbie, recalls being left alone to care for her grandmother when she was 13. "She was, like, wearing three dresses, and would put her purse down and make the bed up over it and then spend the rest of the day looking for her purse," she says. "Looking back, she was clearly experiencing symptoms, deep in it. We just weren't that aware of stuff back then."

Debbie's father died mysteriously when she was 18, having fallen into a monsoon drain in Singapore, where the family was living. A brilliant yet bipolar executive for Brown Paper Co., he brought untold suffering upon Debbie's mother via alcoholism and considerable time spent at a Boston psychiatric hospital. But her mother's long bout with grief largely ended when she got Alzheimer's.

"My father had given her a lot of trouble in his life, and she had forgotten about it," says Debbie of her mother's last years. "She wasn't angry about it anymore, and I was really happy to have my non-angry mother back. I hadn't seen her without that little bit of a chip [on her shoulders] in a lot of years. It was nice to see her spirit back, the spirit she probably had as a child."

She recounts their time at the family's lake cabin in 1993, a year or so before her mother's death. Driving around the area in an attempt to drop some garbage off at the dump, they got lost.

"I have a terrible sense of direction, and she couldn't find [the dump] either. We kept ending up at this place called Spiderwood Gardens where you can buy flowers. And so we said, 'Hey, as long as we're here, let's buy some flowers!' So we'd buy some flowers, get back in the car, and then we'd go off again. 'Did you say to turn right, or am I supposed to turn left?' We were just hysterical, and we'd end up back at Spiderwood Gardens again. Finally we got back to the house with all these flowers and garbage! Everyone thought we were such a hoot."

Block believes that some Alzheimer's sufferers find comfort in their condition—bliss, even. Though he is careful to note that each Alzheimer's case is different, he believes that for many sufferers it is a relief to forget.

"In the face of tragedy, what we want is a redo," he says. "In the case of Alzheimer's, because your brain is your reality, you get to undo the sadness of your life."

Some Forgetting readers take issue with this idea, which they believe plays out through a fantasy parallel world in the book called Isidora, a golden land "without memory, where every need is met and every sadness is forgotten." Residents of Isidora may fall in love with the same person a thousand different times, and when hungry, they feast, "briefly living only for the pleasure of eating." The legend of Isidora is described to Seth and Abel by their mothers, who learned about it from their parents.

And so the history of Isidora was passed along: sometimes to offer the younger generation comfort, sometimes for the sake of tradition, and sometimes to express what would otherwise be inexpressible in the finite worlds and spaces of simple reality... The past and the future were the same place, an impossible but inevitable destiny, to which they all, together, were bound.

On his Web site WordSmith, amateur book critic Sam F. Smith, who says he has a close family member with Alzheimer's, calls the description of Isidora "particularly inappropriate for the subject matter. It's hard to believe that people under threat of developing [Alzheimer's] would envision such a place as a relief from their disease—it seems more like a nightmare. It is memory that makes us human—without it, we are little more than animals."

Jonathan Franzen echoed similar sentiments when describing his father's dark, last years with Alzheimer's in a 2001 New Yorker article called "My Father's Brain." "I wish he'd had a heart attack instead," Franzen wrote. (Block nonetheless cites the essay as influential in the creation of his book.)

But another way to understand Isidora is not as an imagined respite for the afflicted, but as a source of comfort for unafflicted loved ones. Says Clegg: "If you're watching somebody fade away and not remember you—while you remember every single heartbreak and triumph that you've had with that person—it seems natural to me to then imagine a place where memory doesn't exist. If you're the one left, memory is a burden, so I think it's natural to imagine a place where one would be unencumbered by that."