December is a time of year steeped in memories; like the tea in my cup, they become stronger and more potent the more time we spend in it. A lot of these memories are filled with childhood fun and holidays spent with family and food and presents. Most of my adult memories of December consist of holiday shoppers and long days and nights spent working retail to fulfill other people’s holiday desires. 

But it isn’t specifically December or holiday memories that I find myself contemplating as the wind and snow slap strong against the windows today, but of memory in general. My Grandma Larvick loved Christmas and the holidays. Gathering family together, making pies and brownies and fudge to celebrate the season was important to her. And while those memories are wonderful, they aren’t the memories that come to mind when I think of Grandma. The memories I cherish the most were the ones where I had her all to myself. We’d play a few of the old board games she had like Memory (I always wanted to find the strawberry match) and Pick Up Sticks. If I was staying overnight, we’d jump into the old beige truck that had no power steering or air conditioning and head to the local gas station to rent a movie. At night we’d sleep downstairs on the pull out bed and I’d make her tell me the story of the three little pigs. Her version had an extended ending about the pig with the bricks going to a fair and luring him back to his home where he tricks the wolf into climbing down his chimney into a burning fireplace. “And that was the end of the big bad wolf,” she’d say, and I’d grin at the gruesomeness of it all. 

About five years ago, I was going through some memory boxes and sorting through cards and papers and things I had kept, trying to determine what, if anything, still had meaning for me. As I was going through a pile of cards from my high school graduation, I found a three page letter from Grandma tucked within her (and Grandpa’s) congratulations card. It was delightful to see her words in her voice so plain and clear on the page. In the letter, she says that she has so many memories of our time together and that she would remember it always. As I sat rereading the letter, Grandma was long into an Alzheimer’s diagnosis that would eventually take her life, but not before it took everything else that made her who she was.

The interesting thing about Alzheimer’s is that it is so selective in what it chooses to take first and what memories stay the longest. Horse didn’t really get to have a strong relationship with his own biological grandparents. They were either dead already or died when he was younger. So my grandparents became his grandparents as an adult. Of course, Grandma took to him immediately, crushing him and his heavy leather biker-style jacket in a hug when I first introduced them. Throughout the years, even in the depths of Alzheimer’s, she remembered him, and would always tell me to “give Horse a kiss on the nose” for which I’d reply that his nose was impossible to miss. 

On the eve of Labor Day, 2021, I sat up with Horse from midnight to six a.m. alternating between rubbing his legs that were aching to trying to calm him down when he’d have pain in his midsection. As I sat next to him in bed, running my fingers soft over his arm in an attempt to lull him to sleep, I started telling him Grandma’s story of the three little pigs. I got through the main plot that everyone knows, the wolf failing to blow down the brick house, when I realized, mid sentence, that I couldn’t remember the details of the second part of the story, just pieces. This story that I had probably heard a hundred times over the years as a kid was missing a large section, and no matter how hard I tried to retrieve it, I couldn’t do it. That part of my memory was gone like so many little pigs in a hungry wolf’s stomach. 

If we are to live on as memories when we die, what happens to us when those memories begin to fade and disappear completely? When those memories are all we have left, it’s like losing the person all over again. If it can happen this time, what memory will depart next? The responsibility of remembering fills my days as I remind our cat Rosemary that her “dad” got her that mouse toy with the pocket protector she just pushed under the couch. I often reminisce to an empty passenger seat while driving (I even still leave the heated seat on low during the winter), afraid that an unnurtured memory will starve and leave me alone, with no means to call it back. And I want all of the memories. Not just the good, but the difficult ones too. I want the full picture of these lives that intertwined with my own for however long they lasted. I hoard these memories through smiles and tears and screams to the universe declaring the unfairness of it all. I am the last remaining pig, left to provide an account of the others’ life and passing. I can’t afford to forget anything else.