My paternal grandfather suffered from Alzheimer’s disease.

So I guess it shouldn’t have come as that big of a shock when my father started showing symptoms of it. Or when he started to forget important things like where he had parked his car. Or when he had to retire early from his job. Or when he couldn’t remember how to start and operate his riding lawnmower. Or when he kept asking me to show him again and again how to put gas in his car. Or when he started to have difficulty speaking and got increasingly frustrated when he couldn’t get out the words he was trying to say. Or when he got to the point that he couldn’t really do much of anything and could no longer be cared for at home and had to be placed in a home where he could be properly cared for 24 hours a day.

It was especially difficult for my mother seeing and trying to interact with this person—her husband, the one she had fallen in love with, married, and made a family with all those years ago, who no longer much resembled the man she had known and loved all these years. She had a hard time seeing what had become of him and so she seldom did.

And the rest of my family was much the same. My brothers and sisters, one living only 30 minutes away and the others though living out of state, even when coming to visit my mother, almost always found a reason to wait till the next time to go visit their father, only a few minutes away.

To be sure, it isn’t easy to see someone, to care for someone and maybe especially to love someone who is so different from that person you have known and loved for so much of your life. Someone who can seem so far away—Someone who can’t really speak or even seem to understand what you are talking about—Someone who has a vacant look in their eyes as if what was once there is now gone—Someone who can seem to recognize you, but at the same time, not know exactly who you are—And even someone who can sometimes seem to not know you at all.

After a while, we can sometimes find ourselves imagining how we would feel in their place and we can begin to think what a horrible existence this has to be—to not be able to do anything, even to communicate at all. And even if our mind should still somehow be working, no matter the appearance, how terribly frustrating that must be not to be able to express what we are feeling and thinking. And it is so difficult on the family. Being forced to judge only by what we see, it can be easy to think that maybe death would be preferable to this life—a life with little if any quality or value at all.

And certainly, Alzheimer’s is not the only way we end up in a similar condition. There were people with my father who were there for other reasons.  All kinds of disorders, accidents, injuries and diseases can result in similar conditions. We probably all know someone like this.

But before we pass judgement on what this life must be like, maybe it would be good if we think long and hard about a couple of things.

The first and most important one is God.

God tells us throughout the bible that he will never leave us—no matter what.

Do not be alarmed because he is our God—don’t be afraid for I will help you. Should you pass through the waters or rivers I will be with you and they will not swallow you up. If you walk through fire you will not suffer and the flame will not burn you. Do not be afraid for I am with you—Be strong, be firm, have no fear for I am going with you, and I will not fail you or desert you—I know what plans I have in mind for you, plans for peace and not for disaster—and the peace of God which is beyond our understanding will guard your heart and your thoughts in Jesus Christ—neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nothing already in existence and nothing still to come, nor any power, nor the heights nor the depths, nor any created thing whatever, will be able to come between us and the love of God, known to us in Christ Jesus our Lord—And look, I am with you always; yes, to the end of time.

Faith can be a difficult thing—believing what we can’t see is one thing—believing that the truth can be other than what we see right in front of us is another. But God says over and over and over and over that he will never leave us—even to the end of time. He doesn’t mention any exceptions or anywhere that the promise is only good if our physical body is in a good operating condition.

The second thing we need to give thought to is that our being does not consist solely of a physical body, but also a soul. God is not that concerned about the body. It’s our soul that he’s interested in.

If you’re like me, you may not give much thought to the soul maybe mainly because it is not a physical thing we can look at and examine, but something invisible that no one really seems to know hardly anything about except that when we die, it is going to somehow jettison itself from the body and go to exist forever somewhere (hopefully happily with God in heaven) forever and ever. We also know, because the catechism tells us, that the soul is what gives motion to the body—so the physical body is pretty worthless without the soul. Even many people who don’t believe in God believe something about them is going to exist forever.

And if we think about it, we know that our soul whatever it might be must contain our total essence, including our thoughts and memories because our body, including our brain that receives all the credit now, will not be with us once we die, and when we see God. We will even be without our eyes, mouths, ears, arms and legs and all those other things we don’t think we can do without—and yet we will. Because even if we can’t really comprehend it, anything and everything is possible with God.

And God doesn’t need our body to communicate with our soul. So even with a broken body, God has no problem. St. John of the Cross wrote about what he termed “the dark night of the soul”. It’s a period in the spiritual life when you feel that God has abandoned you and you are filled with silence, loneliness and emptiness. Mother Teresa talked about experiencing it for nearly 50 years. St. John also talked about how in this desolate period, no matter how you might feel or what you might think, you are closer to God than you have ever been and that God is actually perfecting you, purifying your soul and strengthening your faith to be more like him. And many saints say the same thing about God communicating directly with the soul when they talk about contemplative prayer.

So if God promises to never leave us, and we know that God loves our soul and can communicate directly with the soul even without us consciously realizing it, why would we not believe that no matter how things might look, they may not be as they appear. The soul cannot be destroyed or damaged in any way other than through sin. It will exist forever. My father, your father, our spouse, our child, our relative, our neighbor, our friend—whoever it might be that finds themselves in a similar situation, has a soul—and even if we find it hard to believe, each and every soul is of value—of great value—of infinite value!—to God, and it should also be to us.

Alzheimer’s to the best of my knowledge is not reversible, even for a short amount of time. Yet when I went to visit my father barely a week before he passed, he was perfectly normal. He knew who I was and was happy to see me, we laughed, walked and talked and watched a little TV while we drank a soda. And his eyes no longer had that vacant look.

How was that possible?

And look, I am with you always; yes, to the end of time.