The late Hollywood icon Bette Davis was spot on when she intoned, “Old age ain’t no place for sissies.”

Perhaps then, I’m a sissy.

At 71, looking down the barrel of Alzheimer’s, a slow dance progression of mind/body decline, intense loss of self and place, acute spinal stenosis and scoliosis, advancing prostate cancer, macular degeneration, and black hole depression, I find myself at the intersection of two roads diverging in the woods.

Fight or flight.

There's something final about death. But is it really the end? Or is death just a beginning?

Over time, in wrestling with the spiritual side, I’ve come to believe that death is the gateway—eternity for those of both good and evil, the yin and the yang of the universe.

It’s taken me a while to get to this view, and I was tested on it recently.

The brain is powerful; the soul even more so.

The combination of the two is the beginning of wisdom.

Music and the creative arts have a way of mending minds—mind-to-soul.

In Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, music and the creative arts, can often keep people whole as they grip life, tantamount at times to a terrifying ride on the Coney Island Cyclone.

See how...