If he still has life left in this world, the old man will turn one hundred in three months. For months, the pains of old age and its increasing disabilities have added each day to his suffering. His memory deteriorates further every day, and since the last time he fell, two weeks ago, he regains relative awareness and mental clarity only for brief minutes during the day. In those short intervals of clarity and awareness, he recognizes for fleeting moments his daughter and granddaughter, who have remained beside him with love.

Many of us imagine that people living with dementia and memory loss are completely cut off from the human world. Yet the truth is that although dementia casts the dust of non-being over the past and over the sense of temporal continuity, the experience of the present moment, however short and fleeting, continues with all its intensity. Even if an experience remains in the mind for only three seconds, it can still be joyful, sad, and even full of meaning.

In these passing moments of clarity, the old man holds tightly to the hands of his daughter and granddaughter and tells them that he loves them. He senses that the end of his life is near and knows with his whole being that, before this unavoidable ending and the little time that remains, love—and love alone—is what matters. In these brief returns to the possibility of human living, all the importance of life’s commotion and of what once seemed important to him loses its colour and disappears. It is as though everything in life except love had been no more than a mirage.

Perhaps the closest experience to being cared for with love is to care for others with love. Accepting that we should allow another person to care for us requires considerable strength of spirit. Many of us cannot accept incapacity and need. Caring for another also requires courage: the courage to move beyond ourselves and, with humility, compassion, and even gratitude, experience the extraordinary cycle of life.

Many times in life we have to stop and face our fears, and old age and the disability that may accompany its final stage are among the most difficult encounters with those fears. The opportunity to care for another person and to be cared for ourselves offers both sides of this experience a unique possibility: to encounter the human spirit and the cycle of death and life. The truth is that both sides of this experience are capable of transforming life’s loneliest sufferings—even in all their tragic and crushing force—into an experience of connection, love, and the growth of the human spirit.

Aydin Areta