Sounds of change, when I think of my daughter: the first cry of a beautiful little girl entering the world in the delivery room of Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital; her laughter at walking Brewster flats as hermit crabs tickled her toes; her anticipation as she climbed for the first time those steep steps of the yellow school bus on her way to kindergarten; the cheers on the softball field as she turned a double play; the stench of the old Boston Garden as we watched Disney on Ice together; the swing of “Sweet Caroline” at Fenway; sitting in Tom Brady’s personal suite for a Pats game at Gillette Stadium; the rip of my heart as she left for Elon University, and I felt in change there was something terrible wrong. Then, the first time she brought her husband to be home with her, and I felt something was terribly right.

Bless you, Larry David! We all need to take a page from you. Not long ago, neurons in my head from progressions of dementia misfired again in public; this time at Boston’s Logan Airport on a trip to Los Angeles with my wife—blanks due mostly to the shrill noise and seizing confusion of flying. I wasn’t acting “first classy,” and was suffering from the isolation of feeling somewhat useless, as I often do now…

I had another Larry David moment in Scottsdale, Arizona heading to the airport with my wife Mary Catherine and son Conor. The “Warden” (aka Mary Catherine) let out too much rope, and asked me to call an Uber to the hotel to take us to Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport for the trip back to Boston. So I punched in the specifics, noting we were going to Scottsdale Airport, a small plane, community airport…Wrong punch! The start of a day I’ll never forget.

By hook or by crook, I was destined to connect in Ireland with John Joe Vaughan—two brash Irishmen separated by a sea of blue, roiling waters rushing to a horizon where water flushes up against the sky. It was God-ordained. We are brothers, joined now in a worldwide fight against Alzheimer’s, from Cape Cod to the Irish Sea. I found my soul here…

My close friend Steve Johanson, a man of great faith, in a shared passage, battling the demon Alzheimer’s, passed peacefully at 12:20 am Easter Monday few years ago in a Wellesley nursing home outside Boston after a bruising bout, a “No Más” final round, then a serene handoff from the mind to the soul. Winds of change carried Steve to new heights from a midnight embrace with his wife Judy to the freeing of paradise where there are no tears, only for those left behind. Wrote Steve, an avid sailor, years ago: “When the wind shifts, you don't give up. Adjust your sail, and chart a new course.”

Writer Ken Kesey, author of the iconic, pioneering 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, never lost his footing in his finest work, writing of the misunderstood and the struggle against the system, adapting personal experiences from working the night shift in a psychiatric ward at a mental institution. Kesey never accepted that the patients were insane, but instead that the world had cast them out, given they did not meet conformist standards of behavior. There are great parallels in Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, as we press forward in faith, hope, and humor.

I was to meet the Very Reverend Tracey Lind, retired Dean of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland, for morning coffee recently at the Hot Chocolate Sparrow in Orleans on Outer Cape Cod. We’ve become good friends. She preaches during the summer at the Chapel of St. James the Fisherman in nearby Wellfleet, and still writes with great talent on her blog titled, “Interrupted by God.” A victim of frontotemporal dementia, a subject of a CBS 60 Minutes segment, Tracy is an inspiration to me. I wanted to be on good behavior, but wasn’t dressed for the occasion. It still has Tracey laughing…