The sad thing is, for men this is almost reversed, with well over 60% of men finding an excuse to leave the sick partner. Conditioning? Hormones? I don’t know, but it deeply troubled me at the time.

The importance of incorporating new memories is well-considered and presented by Oliver Sachs. Perhaps my reading of the article is affected by my own viewing (probably ten years ago) of a video documentary of Wearing’s predicament. As I watched the documentary, I saw Wearing’s ebullience each time Deborah arrived to visit. I saw how the all-encompassing present brought him such reassurance whenever he had the opportunity to rehearse with a choir.

I’m glad that Sachs spent considerable time on the issue of emotional memory. I try to imaging the confusion that I would experience had my own wife walked into the room, suddenly twenty years older. It would seem that Wearing must be soaking in some sort of emotional memory given his repeated and complete-seeming happy acceptance of Deborah.

The passages about Wearing’s reaction to his own journal are especially moving. The documentary I viewed showed scenes of Wearing’s brief though intense struggles to reconcile his journal with his conflicting memory. What? His own handwriting indicates that this was not the first time he met this visitor, but his own memory tells him that this IS he first time. The visitor was the person making the documentary—perhaps it was Sachs himself. My own memory is not clear, though, a reminder that each of us is on that same continuum with Wearing. I often think, “Thank goodness for my continuous loss of memory, that I am allowed to live life in reasonably good conscience.” But there is also a downside to this existential analgesic.

Wearing’s story is disconcerting, though, in that it reminds me of the effects of Alzheimer’s. I know several adults who are currently caring for their own aging parents afflicted with Alzheimer’s. The story of Wearing has many parallels, including the slow retrograde amnesia and the frustration when these patients semi-realize that something is wrong. For those in the advanced stages, every day becomes the same day, where they might do such things as ask their own adult children what they do for a living or ask where their long-deceased spouse is.

In the end, even Wearings’ mind successfully and usually seamlessly fills in the huge memory gaps. His mind works hard to steer him around the horrific possibility that he is quite unwell. It continually writes an extradinary narrative that steers around the possibility that Wearing is not really living in the present. I saw this same phenomenon with my own grandmother, who, toward the end, had a tried-and-true repertoire of rather simple greetings and farewells to buttress a dramatic loss of her ability to update the present. Did it “work”? Depends on how you define “work.”