Dear EEG Machine,

Your output tells us about the frequency range of electrical activity in the brain. But what you produce also looks like a graph to me——-one that measures how my moods rise and fall depending upon how my father’s memory ebbs and flows.

When Beau’s brain activity dips, so too does my happiness. I don’t even have to be with him, and I just know. I reckon sometimes that if I am feeling glum for no apparent reason, then he must be having a bad day where he is. This happens to twins, so why not a father and daughter who are a nearly identical genetic match? I carry his ApoE3, so why not his psyche?

When Beau said the word “gal” over the phone to me to on Thanksgiving after I had screamed “I love you” into the receiver at the top of my lungs about seven times, an EEG of our brains at that moment would have shown a great leap up, perhaps like a grand mal epileptic seizure.

He remembered; I rejoiced. Two heads of one mind.

Love,

Gal