By A. O. Wallat
He was dying. I could tell. We all could. All Peter ever ate was chocolate and all he ever drank was red wine. His dementia was explained to me with a simple analogy:
We are all brand new computers when we’re born. We all operate in similar ways; throughout life our hard drives slowly fill with memories and we pick up programs that perform specific functions just in the same way we learn new things. Like people, sometimes computers die unexpectedly. In Peter’s case, he got a virus which was slowly deleting his files and programs, deleting his memory. By the end he could barely perform the simplest of tasks. Parts of computers might break and can be replaced just like hips and hearing but once you lose the hard drive, well, that’s it.
I found him lying slumped on the stairs. He was clutching a bottle, and red wine stained the carpet. His body was cold, lips blue. A photograph lay on the landing, of you.
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