Anyone who’s read my other books will tell you that I love writing character dynamics and dialogue, but I also love epic action scenes and explosions in the sky and small heroes facing huge, universe-ending odds. So, when my mother suggested that I write a story about Alzheimer’s, my first response was an immediate and emphatic no, thank you. How would that even work? There was no enemy to confront, no mystery to solve, no shocking twist ending.
And how would a book like that be anything but depressing?
In December 2017, Alzheimer’s took my grandfather. He, and my family by extension, had been struggling with it for a few years. It’s why my mother had suggested the story in the first place. I’d had a front-row seat to what life with an Alzheimer’s sufferer was like, both for the afflicted and the family, so I knew I could bring real-life experience to the story. Every family’s experience is different, so I couldn’t represent every situation, but I could at least represent one. Ours. Still, I resisted.
As my family gathered for his funeral, I listened to their stories, and I saw all those long days written on their faces. The early days, when my mother and her sisters began to think that something was wrong. The later days, when my grandfather would walk into a room full of family with the look in his eye that said he didn’t recognize any of us. The thousand days in between, some marked by tears, others by the choice to laugh instead of collapsing under the weight of slow, inevitable sorrow. I heard a hundred more stories from times when I wasn’t there, told in tones of remembered desperation, when my grandfather’s loved ones would have done anything to bring back the person he had been, if only for a day.
That’s when it happened. After I had resisted for more than a year, two ideas occurred to me that changed everything.
The first was a question that became the heart of the story. How could a boy hold on to hope while his hero was falling to an unstoppable disease? The second was a version of the very first line of the book. “Grandpa didn’t remember me today.” From that day on, I saw the characters of Archie and Raymond Reese clearly, and I knew that I had to write their story.
Thanks for sharing it with them.