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My sister has a fantasy about our old age: She imagines that the seven siblings in our family will be living together again, in a house somewhere. Five will be wandering around in bathrobes, lost to dementia. The other two, their minds intact, will look after the lost ones.

In this whimsical scenario, for some reason I am one of the two who stay lucid and do the caretaking. I have mixed feelings about that.

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These days, one brother has a habit of filling our sibling group text with links to articles about Alzheimer’s, what could cause it, what might prevent it, what treatments may be just over the horizon. Could excessive napping be a culprit? Can light therapy restore the brain? My favorite is the piece that, with paper-thin evidence, linked a heightened risk of dementia to — I’m not making this up — nose-picking.

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