Swimming Solo

One sunny morning at a family beach cottage, Susan Rava discovers that her father-in-law has set out to swim solo across Lake Michigan-the first hint that he might be slipping into dementia. Within six months, he is diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. When, four years later, Rava's father shows her a note with her mother's name scribbled on it-"So I don't forget," he explains-she realizes her voyage into the uncharted waters of caring for loved ones with Alzheimer's disease has just begun as it sequentially overtakes her husband's parents and her own. Starting with that fateful day at the Lake Michigan shore, Rava shares the journey she and her husband completed 14 years later with the death of her mother. Susan Rava is a retired senior lecturer in French language and literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times Book Review and the Christian Science Monitor. Two of her short stories received honorable mentions in Houghton Mifflin's Best American Short Stories of 1986 and 1987.