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If you're new to this blog and want some context for it, read this post from the day I announced my Alzheimer's disease and this post about the day I announced I had lost it. For more info, visit my website with my autobiography and all blog entries in chronological order for easier reading to catch up. There's also a sermon on the spiritual lessons I've learned through this journey through my damaged mind.

Sunday, October 19, 2014

The Last Post … (?)

Washington DC
Some of you will have noticed that I haven’t written in almost a month; you may be wondering what’s happened to me.  I’m fine, but I just haven’t had anything new to say.  My cognitive lights are no longer winking out.  True, some are still burned out and unlikely to return, but it seems I’ve written everything I’ve had to say about them.  So it’s time to end this chapter in my life and close “Watching the Lights Go Out.”

This journey since my initial diagnosis of Alzheimer’s two years ago has been a wild and amazing ride.  As I’ve written before, I have been and still am grateful for this ongoing experience; I’ve become a better and more joyful person.  Writing here has given me the opportunity to share the journey with others, thereby clarifying my own experience. 

More important, however, has been the joy I’ve felt in the growth of this community created by you who have been reading it.  Many of you have used the comments section of the blog.  At least as many others have written me privately through my website.  And I suspect there are others who, for many different reasons haven’t written but still feel part of this community.  All of you have given me many gifts for which I am, and will remain, deeply grateful for each one of you.

This blog has been explicitly about my own personal experience with cognitive decline, “watching the lights go out.”  It’s been that first-person, intimate story that has captured people’s interest and sometimes even their hearts.  It’s important to me that I maintain the integrity of that purpose. 

I’m going, therefore, to close the blog.  I will be writing, however, about the process of aging in much the same personal style.  I'm not yet sure where I'll write it.  Perhaps I will create a new blog for that … or another topic.  Perhaps, after a time to make a clear break with the past, I will re-open this one.  I will post something here about where you will be able to find it.  But for now I’m done.

I am deeply grateful.