WRB

Try to remember to forget


illustration by Okan Arabacioglu

Memory loss is like bad weather: You can complain, but there’s little you can do about it. Which is not to say people won’t try.

My wife’s father was a voracious reader, especially of detective stories and history. He had books by the hundreds stacked in his home. One day I noticed many were marked inside with the letter X.

They are “reminders,” my wife said.

“Of what?”

“That he had already read the book.”

I thought it a good strategy against a diminishing memory; nobody wants to travel the same road twice. But recently something happened that made me reconsider.

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