This is for my mother and father, Alece and Denver Key — and, if I’m honest, for the rest of us too.
My mother died of Alzheimer’s in 2020; my father died of ALS five years later. Alzheimer’s is the one they call the long goodbye, and I never understood the phrase until we lived it. Everything you read about these diseases is true, and worse. Both times, what I wanted most was the one thing no one could give me: to know what was coming, and roughly when, while there was still time to prepare instead of being blindsided.
What I can’t shake is that it may not be finished with us. The disease that took my mother runs through her side of the family — her mother, her brother, three of her sisters. I watch for it now in my own generation. I think about my children, and theirs. That is the part the obituaries don’t carry: the people still here, waiting to find out.
I am a modeler, not a doctor. I can’t cure these diseases, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But I spent a career learning to aim careful analysis at hard problems, and I believe I can make a small but real contribution to understanding and predicting them: the kind of honest foresight I wish we’d had, and that my family may still need. My father believed that seeking the truth was an act of faith, and he never stopped asking the hard questions. This is me asking the hardest one I know. I can’t promise an answer, but I have to try. It’s how I honor them — and how I look out for the rest of us.