You are in the back of a black cab on a typically overcast, drizzly day. Then you notice the street lights are on earlier than normal as you catch the amber hue, refracting through the raindrops racing each other diagonally down the window. The smell of former passengers fills your nostrils; the stale cigarette smoke, the hint of perfume, the take-away, the more recent vapour from an e-cig when, from what seems like unfathomable distance away, a voice intrudes on your thoughts. “How’s it going?” The most innocuous of questions, repeated so many times it’s now synonymous with “hello”. You’re torn from your thoughts of the previous hour. The hour in which you got the confirmation of the thing you’ve been dreading for months. The thing that’s been causing you to feel isolated and anxious. The thing that’s been chasing away your appetite for food and company. To the best of the doctor’s knowledge, you have early onset Alzheimer’s.

You wonder how to reply to the driver’s query. How is it going? Do you know? How can you answer that? Can the doctor be right? You’ve become a little forgetful, but that could be stress from work? You work as much as possible and don’t have much left at the end of the month, if anything at all. Money matters cause stress, stress causes lack of sleep, lack of sleep causes the odd lapse in mental faculty. That’s all! Is it? They’ve done their tests. It’s not conclusive. It never is. You keep yourself healthy. Why would that matter? You’ve still not replied. Is the pause too long? Can you open up to a stranger about your news? Should you? Would it be better to spill your guts to this stranger than to breakdown in front of your family later? All these thoughts chase each other through your head and without being aware of choosing to, you respond; “everything’s fine”. A nice non-committal reply that doesn’t encourage further discussion, leaving you free to allow your vision to blur as you stare unfocusing at the raindrops on the window.


You have spent some time trying to come to terms with this diagnosis, flitting between the positions of refuting the doctors and trusting their judgement. You're not the first case they’ve seen afterall. While walking down a busy path you spy, in your peripheral vision, a newspaper cover featuring the visage of someone who makes your blood boil. Someone that you know, before they open their mouth that it’s going to spew such unfiltered hatred you wonder how they are given such coverage. In an instant your perception shifts from uncertainty about your situation, to a righteous indignation that you, a self-certificated good person, can be lumbered with such bad fortune, while this person can operate with impunity, whipping up hatred and spewing bile wherever they go. You, who volunteers; you, who gives to charities; you, who just wants to live a moral life, has been dealt this hand. You pause to think. This is not a unique situation is it? You reminisce back to the news of the last few weeks. So many vile people granted such a platform. So many of them in positions of measurable power, not to mention influence in the public sphere. Are these people as “good” as you? Where is their comeuppance? You begin to fume internally at the cosmic injustice you perceive.

Where will blind rage at people you don’t know get you? All it will do is alienate people you do know, who are trying to help you through the most difficult time of your life. They tell you they’ll pray for you. They tell you to keep faith. You’ve never had much faith in religion. You’ve always been of a more logical mind. Having not been raised in a religious household, you wonder how anyone would come to have a religious mindset without having been raised where religious texts are treated as fact. How can people disregard the evidence of scientific experts over generations in favour of tales of magic. Still; can there be something in it? You’ve seen stories of people whose cancer has gone into remission through the power of prayer when medical science has failed them? Can they all be hoaxes? Can the power of belief be enough, even if the belief is in something that does not exist? Does it exist? Can anyone discount the possibility of something beyond our ability to sense it? Human eyes can only detect one hundred trillionth of the electromagnetic spectrum, but that doesn’t mean radio waves don’t exist. Does that mean that beyond the big bang that there is no “being” that created it? Can belief in such a thing undo what’s happening to you? Would you be a hypocrite to turn to this after a life of rational thought?

Sitting alone in a darkened room you have your headphones on, listening to some nostalgic music from your youth. Remembering the good times you used to have going to clubs and listening to this same song far too loudly while it was fresh. Back then you were surrounded by your friends and strangers and flashing lights and the music thumped through your entire body. Now, somehow the music feels hollow in this surrounding. It doesn’t fill you with the same thrill it used to. You take off your headphones and sit with them in your lap, the tinny sounds still emitting. Your eyes rest on the shelf with photos of your family, your cousins, your nieces and nephews and you wonder how you will broach the subject of your diagnosis with the youngest. Will they understand that in the near future, on a bad day, that you might not recognise them? That the very event of their birth might be something you need explained to you? That you may be more confused than anyone else in the room and that you’re not in command of the situation?

You carry on with your day to day in a daze, working without enthusiasm, refusing invitations to socialise after work, spending your weekends indoors. You’re eventually persuaded to attend the birthday party of a young relative. In the instant before the candles are blown out you look around at the joy on the faces of your relatives and you feel a sense of warmth in your stomach as you remember all the good times you’ve had together. In the future, those memories may come and go, but for everyone else, those fond memories of you will remain. You feel thankful for those times you’ve had together and you hope they feel the same way. The confusion and anger will, from time to time, return but your loved ones will help you through it. If anything, the diagnosis has brought you closer to your family as they attempt to see you through the darkest times since that day and the taxi ride. You begin to wonder what it will feel like to see the look of recognition in their eyes in the days to come, when you are no longer the person you once were… At least you know that you'll be in their hearts forever.