While There Is Still Time

The hardest negotiations aren’t in boardrooms. They’re with time itself.

My parents died years ago.

For much of my adult life, an ocean separated us. Not the figurative sort people invoke when a telephone call feels difficult. The Atlantic Ocean.

I built a career, raised a family, travelled constantly and believed, as busy people rather arrogantly do, that there would always be another flight. Another Christmas. Another ordinary afternoon in which nothing remarkable happened except that we were together.

Then there wasn’t.

There is no app for recovering lost time. Believe me, I would have built it.

Today, my husband Tim and I are the parents and grandparents at the other end of the journey.

Our daughter, her husband and our two grandsons live five hours away. Not across an ocean. Not even four states away. But five hours is still five hours, particularly when walking has become difficult and life has acquired rather more medical appointments than one ever remembers requesting.

They come to see us.

Not constantly, because they have jobs, children, responsibilities and a life of their own. But they come. They call. They include us. They want us nearer.

For that, we are profoundly grateful.

They have asked us to move closer, and we are trying.

Trying, however, is one of those small words that can conceal an entire campaign.

We need a survey of their land before we can properly determine what might be built there. Even obtaining that has taken months and months. Calls. Delays. Waiting lists. Another promise that someone will get back to us.

Meanwhile, the calendar keeps moving with the brisk efficiency of something that has no personal interest in the outcome.

Will the survey be completed?

Will the plans be approved?

Will we find a builder?

Will we get there in time?

That last question is the one beneath all the others.

Because Alzheimer’s has said hello to Tim.

Quietly at first, as these things often begin. A forgotten detail. A misplaced thought. Something that can be explained away until the explanations become more elaborate than the truth.

He is still driving.

Still laughing.

Still himself.

Still remembering our daughter and our grandsons.

And I would very much like to keep it that way.

I want to watch those boys grow.

More selfishly, perhaps, I want my husband to remember that he has grandsons. I want him to know their names, recognize their faces and feel the particular joy that comes when they walk into a room.

I want more time.

There it is.

The great demand none of us is important enough to have granted.

My own physical clock has not exactly behaved impeccably either.

Years ago, a podiatrist named Ira Bernstein treated me.

Some may recognize the name from the national headlines and Dateline. He was convicted for his role in a plot to have his wife killed. After his release, he became entangled in a second alleged murder-for-hire case and is now back in prison after pleading guilty to tampering with evidence connected to it.

My experience was nothing so cinematic.

There were no undercover recordings. No hitman. No television cameras.

Only medical treatment whose consequences, for me, have lasted far longer than the appointments did.

My ability to walk was badly damaged. The resulting limitations changed my life. Reduced mobility led to weight gain, and weight gain made the mobility worse. It is an especially efficient little circle of hell.

The man connected to that damage sits in prison.

I sit at a computer.

Life does enjoy its ironies.

I cannot easily walk the way I once did. I cannot stand for long periods. I cannot pretend that my later years look anything like the ones I had imagined.

But I can think.

I can write.

I can build.

And those long hours at my trusty computer are beginning to produce something other than backache and a collection of half-empty tea mugs.

A book.

Several books, actually.

And now, somewhat to my own surprise, my first novel.

An app.

A business being rebuilt.

An idea that refuses to leave me alone.

The app is called MiM, Memory in Motion.

I am building it because families facing dementia need more than monitoring, pamphlets and the bleak instruction to return in six months so somebody can measure what else has been lost.

They need practical help now.

They need dignity.

They need support that fits into ordinary life.

They need a way to preserve identity, routine, connection and agency for as long as possible.

And a great deal of this would not be possible without artificial intelligence.

I thank my lucky stars every day for the ability to understand the hope it offers. I also understand the fear—the fear of what many cannot yet grasp, and so resist through suspicion or conspiracy, as though resisting change might slow time itself.

In my lifetime, there have been many changes.

I hope to add to them.

I am building this in my seventies, largely with the help of AI, because apparently retirement was becoming dangerously close to restful.

Will it work?

I believe it will.

Will it arrive in time to help Tim?

I do not know.

That is the sentence I hate writing.

But uncertainty is not permission to surrender.

Hope, by itself, can be a flimsy thing. Pretty, comforting and entirely useless unless someone gives it a job.

So I have given mine several.

Write the book.

Build the app.

Help Tim.

Move closer to the children.

Watch the grandsons grow.

Keep earning.

Keep going.

That last part matters because hope does not pay builders, medical bills or grocery prices.

Like many people in their seventies, we have watched the cost of living nibble steadily at reserves that once appeared sufficient. Inflation does not care that someone in the household has Alzheimer’s. The electricity company does not accept purpose as payment.

And so I returned to real estate.

I have worked in this profession for more than twenty years. I have built companies, marketed properties around the world, negotiated difficult transactions and sat at kitchen tables with people facing some of the most consequential decisions of their lives.

Yet I returned to find a profession regarded with more hostility than ever.

Realtors, apparently, are assumed to spend their days plotting to steal hard-earned equity between expensive lunches.

The reality is considerably less glamorous.

I help people face what their property is worth today, rather than what they hoped it would be worth, believed it was worth or were told at a neighborhood barbecue that it must certainly be worth.

Sometimes I have to explain that the wealth they felt they had in their home is not reflected in the market.

Was it ever there?

Perhaps on paper.

Perhaps during an unusually fevered market.

Perhaps only in the reassuring arithmetic we all perform when trying to feel secure.

Telling someone the truth about value is not stealing from them.

It is helping them make decisions before false expectations steal something far more expensive: time.

The people who hire me are not merely clients.

They are helping me keep moving.

They are helping us replenish what rising costs are taking.

They are helping me fund the work on MiM.

They are helping us move toward our family.

They are helping one woman with unreliable feet remain stubbornly useful.

And I hope I help them in return.

That is what work should be: not extraction, but exchange.

I have also become an election official.

Not because I wanted another arena in which to discuss politics. Quite the opposite.

I became one so I could serve the process without arguing politics with anyone.

In a country addicted to shouting, there is something deeply satisfying about quietly helping a neighbor exercise a right.

You check the name.

You hand over the ballot.

You protect the rules.

You do the work.

Perhaps that is the thread running through all of this.

Do the work while you still can.

Love people while they still know you are loving them.

Visit while the journey is still possible.

Build while the mind can still imagine.

Serve while there is still something useful you can contribute.

Say thank you before gratitude becomes a speech delivered to an empty chair.

I am thankful for our daughter and her family.

Thankful that they want us closer.

Thankful that our grandsons know us.

Thankful that Tim is still driving, still remembering and still very much here.

Thankful for every client who places trust in me when trust in my profession has become unfashionable.

Thankful for artificial intelligence, which has given my ideas additional hands when my own two were not enough.

Thankful for the computer that has become workshop, office, publishing house, laboratory and occasionally confessional.

I am frightened too.

Frightened that the land survey will take too long.

That building will take too long.

That the disease will move faster than we do.

That the app will not be ready soon enough.

That the boys will grow while we are still filling in forms and leaving messages for people who never call back.

But fear does not get the final paragraph.

Persistence does.

My body has been altered.

Our finances have been tested.

My profession has been bruised.

My husband’s memory is under threat.

The timetable is appalling.

And still, here we are.

A book is being written.

An app is being built.

A house is being imagined.

A career is being revived.

A family is drawing closer.

A husband is still remembering.

And I am still at my computer, making tea, opening another document and refusing to accept that the most meaningful work of my life must already be behind me.

Time may be running out.

But I am not finished.

About the author

Vanessa Saunders is an author, real estate broker and the founder of MiM, Memory in Motion, a practical daily-life support system for people navigating early-stage Alzheimer’s, dementia and cognitive change, and for the Supporters walking beside them.

MiM was born from Vanessa and her husband Tim’s own experience of the vast gap between diagnosis and daily life. Learn more at livewithmim.org.