Late Vic 3

From Sokoshinbutsu

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still vic

I have since forgotten the name of the neuro degenerative condition I was nearly guaranteed to develop (Huntington's Disease[place in footnote]), but the symptoms were somehow memorable.

Over the course of twenty to thirty years I would slowly, progressively lose all of my mental faculties- memory, cognition, recognition, later but just as slowly I’d lose motor function.

He said I was lucky. He said a lot of guys never get diagnosed and then they fall into a pile of uncategorized dementia diagnoses in their late fifties and sixties. They stop socializing and die at home with their wives feeding and changing them at the end.

He said I'd eventually no longer recognize my friends and family. I might start to get lost on simple errands. I'd forget what I was talking about sometimes.

I might experience what he called blanking.

I admitted to the doctor that that happened sometimes.

He was calmly adamant that ceasing to fuck with my brain chemistry might delay my decline. I took his words to heart and that's how I ended up in a professorial enclave on a hill near the University of Iowa quietly and unassumingly living out my life among people who had no idea I was rich as shit or might someday wander into their homes wondering where I was.

I prepared a speech. I had a kind of moving blanket statement I thought I might unroll onto the people I kept close to me; buddies from the bar, people I had worked with and still met for drinks in Chicago every once in an odd while, cousins and uncles I hadn’t lost entirely while I was making my fortune.

I never felt like I could tell any of them. It would be too much.

I have a degenerative brain disease the result of which may be that within the next ten years I will no longer know who you are or how I know you. I may forget why we are where we are or what we are talking about.

I have decided to go forward consciously, learning to be calm and accepting and reflective to the extent that it remains possible.

December, 19… uh.. nineteen ninety..uh Fuck.

It doesn't really matter does it?

But for some reason it seemed appropriate to tell Fati. She did hold my will, I suppose.

Twenty years simply passed.

I'd probably have fallen for the Hari Krisna or the Mormons if they’d come to the door with a good offer or married someone who a normally socialized guy my age would have recognized as a gold digging strumpet.

Instead, I got Steve.