One Theory about Alzheimer's

[71degrees]

Thanks. Everyone reads things differently (the beauty of poetry / art). You are familiar w/Alzheimer's. I lived w/Alzheimer's. There is nothing "optimistic" about it. Nothing. No reality for the afflicted. A life, yes. But only one of the past. Nothing in the present. Never to the future.

Agreed! I should have qualified my statement. An AD patient with a preserved memory of the past in late stage disease is rare. Short term memory may fail first, but long term memory loss follows for the majority. The long term afflicted live only in a confused state of the present until death. My Aunt and Grandmother died with no sense of the past. There minds were empty of all experience, yet they could still do some things themselves, albeit robotically.

Those memory clips in your poem are all good ones. Therefore, I saw them as a spark in a realm of darkness. A second read gives me that same feeling of an AD patient at least having something to hang onto. I wish my loved ones had those recollections when they passed. Hence, my comment was in that vein. Please accept my deepest apologies, if my observation sounded like an insult to someone has had a suffering loved one.

No insult taken whatsoever. Don't get me wrong, I'm beginning to like this place (with small baby steps), but folks here tend to "read" poems how they want them, or worse, how they think they should be written, rather than trying to understand the subject from the writer's POV. No one knows for sure how a particular subject should be written except the writer. Criticism is always welcome about the particulars of a poem (an image, the tense, hell, even the dreaded lack of punctuation), but once in a while whole poems are rewritten here and I just can't figure out why?

Again, no insult taken about your Alzheimer's observations. My approach is always that art is "open" to interpretation. Always.