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and believed to date back 30 million years—is born as a flower, becomes a weed, dies slowly from the head down; then its white, fluffy seeds, gentle blowballs, genetically identical to the parent plant, blow away to pollinate the world.
    And so it is with Alzheimer’s.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay Fortune of the Republic , “What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” Perhaps Emerson, who succombed to Alzheimer’s, was contemplating the dandelion—a free spirit of a plant, a symbol of courage and hope, with relevance in medicine,legend, and in Christianity. In medieval times, the dandelion, a bitter herb, was a symbol for the crucifixion of Christ.
    The virtue of Alzheimer’s is a hope for redemption—not here for now, but beyond.
    Sitting alone in my office, deep in thought, looking out over an acre of overgrown lawn, sprinkled with dandelions, and surrounded inside by the hard copy of long-term memory, a place where confusion gives way to clarity and humor resurrects, I remember the yarn of the septuagenarian who reluctantly arranged a medical exam after years of denial:
    â€œI have some bad news for you,” the doctor says after a battery of tests. “You have cancer!”
    â€œThat’s dreadful,” the man replies.
    â€œIt gets worse,” the doctor notes.
    â€œYou have Alzheimer’s!”
    The man pauses to collect his thoughts, then says with full confidence, “Thank God, I don’t have cancer!”
    I laugh, but it’s more an enigma than a joke.
    Some inherit stock portfolios and buckets of cash. Others, hand-me-downs. I’ve inherited my folks’ medical records: my late father, Francis Xavier O’Brien, a mulish second-generation Irish American and a Bronx boy, had prostate cancer, complicated by critical circulation disease and an onslaught in final days of dementia; my mother, Virginia Brown O’Brien, with second-generation Irish roots as well, the hero of my life, died of Alzheimer’s in a bruising, knockdown prizefight of a battle, as her father had decades earlier.
    I have been diagnosed with both—cancer and Alzheimer’s.
    I’ve declined cancer treatment for now, on grounds that no one by choice wants to go to a nursing home. I saw what Alzheimer’s robbed from my grandfather and my mother, and learned earlier in life about “exit strategies” from seasoned venture capitalists in New York and Boston. Alzheimer’s, to me, is far more distressing than my cancer. I’m looking now for an exit strategy.
    You can’t remove a brain.
    Daily, I return to my office on the Cape in search of a past that has more relevance to me than the present or a future. There is great peace here among the elements of history, humor, and faith—cornerstones in my life. I look for strength from mentors, past and present, referenced in various clips and photos on the walls: celebrated country editors like the late Malcolm Hobbs of The Cape Codder , a surrogate father figure: the distinguished Henry Beetle Hough of the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette , and my late neighbor John Hay, considered among the nation’s finest nature writers, on par with Henry David Thoreau. Hay was a man who could paint brilliant word pictures with the stroke of a typewriter key as a master does with a brush. I was blessed in spending time with them, absorbing like a sea sponge as they taught me to write. They all have become an enduring part of what I believe a good writer, a persevering individual, ought to be. Perseverance separates the artist from the dabbler, editor Hobbs once told me. So it is with life; you press on.
    Near my writing desk is a copy of the best seller, The Perfect Storm , known in these parts as the Halloween Nor’easter of 1991. I first met author Sebastian Junger as a young man when he was a budding scribbler, soon to be star, and I was an editor at The Cape Codder ,