He was coming back home after visiting his parents and I was headed to visit mine. We met each other at the mid-point, some two thousand feet above ground traveling over the midpoint of America. I hadn’t reached the mid point of my lie and he had not long past it. These people I seem to have nothing in common with, I always end up having the most. The home I’m traveling back to is something different than the home he’s traveling to. The home that I have he no longer has anymore.

Both of his parents live in assisted housing. His father lives in the very assisted nursing home part, and his mother on the independent apartment style living, but both require lots of attention. His father is suffering from dementia. He cannot tell you what he did two minutes ago, nor twenty years ago, but he can describe to you in perfect detail the first time he bought his son an ice cream cone. He can recalls to his son the first time his father raised his voiced, and the first time his mother told him that she loved him too. The man I’m sitting next to has a gentle demeanor, it is almost nervous because he pauses frequently and second guesses what he has just said, but it is so confident and reassuring that after five minutes of talking with him, you realize the nerves are no more than honest contemplation. I’m contemplating what to do with my life and this man is contemplating what he has done with his. Seeing your parents in the state that his are in, he explains to me, practically forces you to become reflective. His father’s loss of memory has thrown him for quite the loop, not that it is especially surprising, but the scenes that his father does remember fascinate him.
His father was a hard-hitting economist. Who worked closely with the government most of his life, and therefore kept most of his work consuming him and a secret to his family. The man sitting next to me, at the time just a boy, rebelled against his father’s conservative ways all his life, with the intention that someday he would pay attention to him. Of course this dynamic is also not uncommon, and rarely successful.
His mother frequently tells his father, “oh your memory is just so terrible these days.” And the father responds, “yeah but my forgetter sure is in great shape.”

We dwell on this idea. That potentially an active forgetter is a positive. The son, the man I am sitting next to, explains to me how much closer he and his father have becomes since he starting forgetting. He notices that this father does not remember passionately discussing the economy, but passionately doing nothing at all. Spending time with his wife and kids, which he rarely did, remains in his mind as a daily occurrence. The man sitting next to me perceives his father’s exclusive slipping memory as some sort of sign. And he looks at me so assured, with no hesitation in his usually stuttered voice at all: what you remember are the personal connections. Those moments that add up to nothing at all.