An awful receding

 Tough times this week in the Trek-inverse, with Pavel  Chekov departing this mortal coil at 90 and Jean-Luc Picard following him at 86. May they both have following winds and a star to guide them by for all eternity.

(And, yes, I know this is not a Sportsball World post. Grab a hall pass and vamoose if you so desire. This Trekkie has other things on which to cogitate this day.)

Anyway, Walter Koenig and Sir Patrick Stewart are gone now, taking big pieces of Trekkie shared memory with them. Who’s left to lay in a course for Kirk and Spock and the Originals now? How’s Data gonna know when to engage the warp drive without Captain Picard to say “Make it so”?

Here in the Blobosphere, it is the latter’s passing that lingers longest, no offense to Ensign Chekov. That’s because Sir Patrick reportedly died from Alzheimer’s and Lewy-body dementia, the latter of which I’m far too conversant with.

Eight years ago, see, my father died of Lewy-body. It is a mean, filthy bastard way to die, because it doesn’t just steal your life. First, it steals everything that made your life what it was. 

Those afflicted with it don’t so much die as … recede. I can’t think of a better word to describe the process. Little by little, what makes the afflicted who they are recedes from loved ones and the world, until all that is left is a shell entirely imprisoned within itself.

Eventually, at least in my father’s case, the afflicted seem to forget that they are even alive. They recede so far they literally forget how to eat. Which is why when my dad finally died, he was nothing but skin and bones.

Long before that, though, he was gone from us. It was a wound that remains in some form or fashion to this day.

Now, I don’t know if this is exactly how it happened with Sir Patrick, and with the many who loved him. Every circumstance is different. But what I do know is a life as full to the top as his, as crammed with joy and laughter and love and accomplishment, deserved far better than to drain away like grains of sand through the fingers.

In any case, he is gone now. As is Walter Koenig. May their memory be eternal, no matter how cruelly it might have been stolen.