The disease didn’t have a name in our house. It had descriptions: the way her hands shook or she lost her words midsentence. The way she could be fully present at breakfast then somewhere unreachable by dinner.
And it had a history. My grandmother had died at 29 of what we believed was something similar, my mother had been symptomatic before I was old enough to form the question, my older sister would be told at 26 that she had it, too. What the disease had in our house was a pronoun. “It.” As in, “it got worse over the winter.” As in, “your sister might get it.” As in, “we don’t know much about it.”