Why We’re Kinder to Strangers Than Our Own Family
I can imagine living in a wheelchair, but I cannot imagine forgetting Happy’s name.
Physical limitations feel manageable—adaptations can be made, tools exist, dignity can be maintained even when mobility is lost. But the prospect of my mind dissolving, of losing the internal landscape that makes me who I am, terrifies me more than any bodily failure. Your body is your vehicle; your mind is your home.
When I think about my mother’s final months, what haunts me isn’t the physical decline—the difficulty walking, the need for assistance with basic tasks. What breaks my heart is remembering the confusion in her eyes when familiar things became foreign, when the architecture of her thoughts began collapsing room by room. She was there but also not there, present in body while slowly disappearing from the inside.
The body’s betrayals are external. You can observe your arthritis, accommodate your hearing loss, work around your limitations. But when memory fails, when reasoning becomes unreliable, when the voice in your head starts speaking in a language you don’t recognize—you lose access to yourself. There’s no adaptation for forgetting who you are. No tool that restores the connections between present and past. No accommodation for the disappearance of consciousness itself.
I think about the man in our neighborhood who wanders sometimes, looking for his childhood home that was demolished thirty years ago. His legs work fine. His heart beats steadily. His body maintains all its basic functions. But he’s lost somewhere inside his own mind, and all the physical health in the world can’t bring him back to the present moment. He exists in a timeline no one else can access, calling out for people who’ve been dead for decades, searching for places that exist only in neurons misfiring their way through deteriorating tissue.
This is why we fear mental decline more than physical—because the self we think of as “me” lives in consciousness, in memory, in the ability to recognize patterns and make connections. When those faculties disappear, who remains? A body continues, breath and heartbeat and metabolism carrying on without the passenger who once directed them. But the person—the consciousness that loved Happy, that remembers Arash’s first words, that carries decades of accumulated experience—where does that go when the mind can no longer hold it?
Physical decline is a negotiation. You lose mobility but keep your mind to adapt. You lose hearing but retain the ability to process what you do hear. You lose strength but maintain the cognitive capacity to find workarounds. The self remains intact even as the body diminishes, observing its own decline with awareness and often grace.
But cognitive decline is erasure. The self doesn’t observe its own disappearance—it IS the disappearance. You can’t witness your own forgetting because the witnessing capacity is what’s being destroyed. You can’t adapt to lost memory because adaptation requires the very cognitive functions that are failing. You become a stranger to yourself without ever fully realizing the estrangement has occurred.
The cruelest irony is that by the time it happens, you may not be aware enough to mourn what you’ve lost. The terror of cognitive decline exists primarily for those still capable of imagining it. Once it arrives, the fear dissipates—not because the situation improves, but because the capacity for that particular fear has been eroded along with everything else. You may be confused or frustrated or frightened in the moment, but you’ve lost the ability to understand the larger tragedy of your own dissolution.
But the people who love you will carry that grief, watching your body persist while your essence gradually vanishes. Happy will remember our conversations while I forget we had them. Arash will hold memories of his childhood that I can no longer access. They’ll mourn me while I’m still alive, grieving the person I was while interacting with the confused shell I’ve become. Their tragedy is loving someone whose continuity has been severed, whose past has been erased from their own awareness.
I think about Happy having to introduce herself to me daily, explaining our relationship to someone wearing my face who no longer recognizes her. I think about Arash visiting a father who doesn’t know he has a son, trying to connect with a stranger who happens to share his DNA. These images terrify me more than any physical disability because they represent the complete failure of what I think of as my self.
What if the fear of losing our minds is really the fear of discovering how fragile the self actually is? We build entire identities around consciousness—our memories, our reasoning, our ability to maintain narrative continuity across time. We think of these as fundamental, as the core of who we are. But they’re not permanent features; they’re ongoing processes maintained by extraordinarily complex biological machinery that can fail catastrophically.
The self isn’t a soul or essence that transcends the physical. It’s an emergent property of working neurons, of intact memory systems, of functional cognitive architecture. When that architecture crumbles, the self doesn’t relocate—it dissolves. This realization undermines every comfortable belief about personal continuity. You’re not a permanent consciousness inhabiting a temporary body. You’re a temporary consciousness produced by a temporary body, and when the production process fails, you simply cease.
Physical decline lets us maintain the illusion of essential selfhood. The person in the wheelchair is still themselves—thinking, remembering, connecting with loved ones, maintaining the internal narrative that defines personal identity. We can lose limbs, organs, sensory capacity, even significant portions of our bodies and still claim continuity of self.
But cognitive decline exposes the truth: there is no self independent of the cognitive processes that generate it. When those processes fail, you don’t continue as a diminished version of yourself. The “you” that would experience diminishment is itself what’s being destroyed. You’re not losing your mind—your mind is what you are, and it’s ceasing to exist while your body persists.
Perhaps this is why we develop such elaborate religious and philosophical frameworks for dealing with mortality. The idea that consciousness continues after death offers comfort against the terror of complete dissolution. But cognitive decline before death offers no such comfort. You’re forced to confront the erasure of self without the consoling possibility of transcendence or afterlife. Your body remains, breathing and eating and sleeping, as proof that biological persistence means nothing if the consciousness it once sustained is gone.
I can imagine adapting to physical limitations because adaptation requires a functioning mind doing the adapting. I cannot imagine forgetting Happy’s name because the “I” doing the imagining would no longer exist by the time that forgetting occurred. The terror is that there’s no one to adapt, no continuous self that finds workarounds for cognitive failure. There’s only gradual dissolution, rooms of consciousness going dark one by one until the house that was you stands empty, still structurally intact but completely uninhabited.
This is the fear that physical decline doesn’t trigger: the fear of discovering that everything you think of as essential about yourself exists only as long as specific biological processes continue functioning correctly. Your body can fail in a thousand ways while you remain yourself. But your brain failing even slightly means you stop being you, replaced by someone who looks like you but lacks access to everything that made you you.
The wheelchair is a tool. The cane is an adaptation. The hearing aid is an accommodation. But what tool exists for restoring a collapsed self? What adaptation addresses the absence of the adapter? What accommodation helps when the person who would need accommodating has ceased to exist?
I fear cognitive decline not because of what I might lose, but because there will be no “I” present to experience the loss. The fear exists now, while I’m still capable of it. Later, when it matters, I’ll be beyond fear—not because I’ve overcome it, but because the capacity for that fear will have dissolved along with everything else that makes me who I am.
