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A FRIEND'S STORY - In 2026, an estimated 7.4 million Americans age 65 and older are living with Alzheimer's disease. About 1 in 9 Americans over the age of 65 has Alzheimer's, and nearly 13 million family members and friends provide care for those living with dementia. More than 7 million Americans are currently living with the disease, a number projected to nearly double by 2050. (Alzheimer’s Association)
It is 4:15 in the morning.
I am sleeping on a couch outside my bedroom, if what I do can still be called sleeping.
Every few hours I wake to listen. Not because I am afraid of burglars or earthquakes or fires. I am listening for Victor.
Sometimes he wakes up convinced it is morning and starts wandering through the house. Sometimes he heads for the coffee maker. Sometimes he simply stands in the hallway trying to remember where he is. When the night terrors come, I sit beside him until they pass.
Fifteen years ago, I thought I had found my happy ending.
Instead, I found Alzheimer's.
Or perhaps Alzheimer's found us.
Victor and I were childhood friends from Gary, Indiana. We spent our youth with cameras in our hands and dreams in our heads. Then life happened. College. Careers. Marriages. Nearly thirty years passed without seeing one another.
I found him again by accident.
Or fate.
Or perhaps through the only language we had ever truly shared—photography.
I was preparing to move to California to help my daughter after she was sexually assaulted on a college campus. The assault itself shattered her life. The system's response shattered mine. Somewhere in the middle of fighting universities, legislators, and a culture that seemed indifferent to victims, I stumbled onto a photography website.
There I found a mysterious underwater photographer named VAZUW.
No profile.
No biography.
Just hundreds of breathtaking images of a world I would never see with my own eyes. Clownfish guarding eggs. Sharks emerging from darkness. Coral exploding with color. Life hidden in the deep.
I wrote to tell him he was the best photographer on the site.
His reply arrived a few minutes later.
"Is this my little Eva from Gary, Indiana?"
It was Victor.
The letters VAZ were his initials.
The UW stood for underwater.
Dummy me.
Thirty years disappeared in a single email.
A few years later we were living together in California, trying to build a life from the wreckage of two failed marriages. We traveled to Alaska on a photography expedition. We watched whales surface beside our boat and eagles plunge into the water for fish. We stood on the deck in awe, like children seeing the world for the first time.
For a brief moment, I thought life had given us a second chance.
Then I started noticing the wheelbarrows.
Six of them.
Maybe more.
There were duplicate tools everywhere. Multiple chainsaws still in their boxes. Push brooms. Garden equipment. Duplicates of everything.
At the time I thought it was eccentric.
Now I know they were breadcrumbs.
The disease had already arrived.
I simply could not see it.
Or maybe I refused to see it.
I lived for years in a place I now call De-Nile.
Not the Nile.
De-Nile.
The river where people float when reality is too painful to face.
Eventually reality caught up.
The neurologists. The scans. The cognitive tests. The spinal taps. The diagnosis.
Alzheimer's disease.
Lewy body dementia.
I remember making a joke.
"Well, Victor," I said, "you were always an overachiever."
We laughed.
Then I went into another room and cried.
Today he wears five shirts because he is cold.
He sleeps fully dressed.
Sometimes he uses a plant for a urinal, problem is it’s in the dining room.
Sometimes he stares into space.
Sometimes he says very little.
But he is still there.
He is still my Victor.
And I am still his little Eva.
The strange thing is that my greatest fear is not that he will forget me.
People assume that's what caregivers fear.
It isn't.
My fear is that I will forget him, who he was.
The physician.
The photographer.
The gardener.
The boy from Gary.
The man who once put his arm across me at a college party and told someone offering me drugs, "Not for her."
When they asked why, he answered, "Because she's the kind who would cross over and never come back."
He knew me then.
Sometimes I wonder if I still know myself.
The other day I was getting a pedicure when I noticed an old woman staring at me.
I became increasingly annoyed.
Who was she?
Why was she staring?
Take a picture, lady. It'll last longer.
Then I realized I was looking into a mirror.
The old woman was me.
That may be the cruelest part of caregiving.
You become so busy remembering someone else that you forget yourself.
I have spent my life being somebody's daughter, somebody's wife, somebody's mother, somebody's advocate, somebody's caregiver.
Somewhere along the way, Eva disappeared.
Perhaps that is why I am writing this.
Not because I have answers.
I don't.
At sixty-nine years old, I understand less about life than I did at twenty.
I have watched rape destroy families.
I have watched cancer steal good men.
I have watched Alzheimer's erase brilliant minds.
I have watched love return after thirty years only to be threatened by heredity/DNA.
And yet, somehow, I am still grateful.
For all of it.
The good.
The bad.
The beautiful.
The terrible.
The whales.
The photographs.
The heartbreak.
The love.
The loss.
Every bit of it.
Because in the end, all any of us really leave behind is memory.
A story.
A photograph.
A name.
Someone who remembers.
And so I write for Victor.
For my daughter.
For my grandfather.
For my namesake, the little girl named Eva who never made it out of Auschwitz.
For the friends I am losing.
And perhaps, most of all, for myself.
Because if memory is love, then writing is an act of remembrance.
And all I am really trying to say is this:
Don't let me forget.
(Eva Amar is the Granada Highlands Community Coordinator and a community advocate focused on land use, wildfire safety, infrastructure planning, government accountability, and public safety issues in Los Angeles.)
