The Swimmers

by Julie Otsuka

a few facts about your condition. It is not temporary. It is progressive, intractable and irreversible. Ultimately, like life itself, it is terminal. The medication will not stop it. Green tea infused with gotu kola and ginkgo biloba will not stop it. Prayer will not stop it. Qigong, “working the steps” and “living more purposefully” (too late for that) will not stop it. Having an unrealistically positive attitude will not stop it and may, in fact, even hasten your decline. There are no exceptions to these rules. Although you are a special person, yours is not a special case. There are eighty-seven other people at Belavista and more than fifty million worldwide who are similarly afflicted. — who gets it? you may be wondering (as well as, Is this a joke? Am I under arrest? And, Did somebody just take my car keys?). Wealthy Mexican drug lords get it. Wildcat Chinese miners in Brazil get it. Unusually good-looking Ivy League professors in the movies get it. Seven-time nominees for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in Leipzig, Germany, get it (Nobel Prize winners, however, do not, due to the salutary effects of the “winner’s boost” on their immune systems). Geriatric prisoners at San Quentin serving out their last years under the three-strikes-and-you’re-out drug laws get it. In a remote inbred fishing village on the northeast coast of Iceland, two out of three people above the age of fifty get it. In an even more remote village in the northern Andes consisting of several large ext...

Archipelago, nobody gets it (life span too short). And then, of course, there’s you, the tiny cohort of one. You got it. — there is no “meaning” or “higher purpose” to your affliction. It is not a “gift” or a “test” or an opportunity for personal growth and transformation. It will not heal your angry, wounded soul or make you a kinder, more compassionate person who is less judgmental of others. It will not ennoble your paid carers (“She’s a saint”) or enrich the lives of those around you who have always loved and adored you. It will just make them sad. Nor will it bring you closer to the higher being or liberate you from your formerly petty concerns. If you worried about your weight before, you will worry about your weight now (“I’m still too fat,” you will say). All it will do is bring you closer to your own inevitable end. — cancer would be better, you may be thinking. Or heart disease. Or a bullet straight through to the brain. Or maybe you are simply filled with regret for all the things you did not do. You should have done more crossword puzzles, taken more risks, signed up for that Great Books class, used up all your vacation days, removed the plastic slipcovers from the “good” furniture (“I’m turning into my mother!” you once said, accurately), worn those expensive heels in the back of your closet you were saving for that special occasion (which would be what?). You should have lived (but what did you do instead? You played it safe and stayed in your lane). Or maybe...

Just Remember the soul inside the body

as the days slip by you will begin to forget more and more. Your terrible childhood during the war. All the beautiful gardens of Kyoto. The smell of rain in April. What you just ate for breakfast. Cream of Wheat, with sausage links and toast. The car accident, forty-three years ago, that killed your favorite cousin, Roy. You will forget the day you first met your husband. I was sure he’d be gone in a week. The perfect baby you wanted so badly. The damaged child that you got instead. All those laps you swam day after day, year after year, in the pool. You will forget the words for bicycle. Fish. Stone. The color of grass. Sounds like stream. And with each memory shed you will feel lighter and lighter. Soon you will be totally empty, a void, and, for the first time in your life, you will be free. You will have attained that state of being aspired to by mindful meditators across the planet—you will be existing utterly and completely “in the now.”

Dementia pluses

what did the bird see in the mirror? you now wonder. Its dead mate or its own reflection? Or were they one and the same?