My grandmother suffers from Alzheimer's. She's in the early stages so the disease manifests itself in repeated questions, forgetfulness, kleptomania and, well, meanness. In this state her ability to recall details is very little, except when it comes to her past loves.

It is astonishing. She is able to remember the high school my grandfather attended when they first met, even the street address of his house in 1940. But to remember what she had for breakfast is a labored, if not impossible, task.

This phenomenon is demonstrated in a fantastic piece by WNYC Radio Lab: Memory and Forgetting. In the third segment of this piece they discuss a man with one of the worse cases of amnesia ever documented.

The story of a man who’s lost everything. Clive Wearing has what Oliver Sacks calls “the most severe case of amnesia ever documented.” Clive’s wife, Deborah Wearing, tells us the story along with Oliver Sacks. And they try to understand why, amidst so much forgetting, Clive remembers two things: Music and Love.



I think this is what we all want to have happen. We want to find love, a love that will last, carry us, and be the foundation of our memory and our forgetting. And that's romantic to me to think that as we fade in this life the only thing that will remain tangible, the only log floating in the river of our memories, will be love.

Who will you hold on to after everything else is forgotten?