http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/sports/baseball/san-francisco-giants-alzheimers-disease.html 2016-09-23 11:55:39 Moments of Giants Glory: What Alzheimer’s Couldn’t Steal For a reporter and his mother, this decade, in which San Francisco has won three World Series titles, has been a long goodbye. === SAN FRANCISCO — Every now and again, when I’m feeling a little down, I go to The Giants went on to win the World Series that year, but that’s not why I remember the July 29 game. I remember that afternoon because my mom, in the throes of Alzheimer’s, left the house she shared with my dad in the Noe Valley neighborhood, walked four or so miles and somehow ended up at AT&T Park. Then she went inside and watched her team. It took a while for me to believe this. When Mom told me she had gone to the park — my dad barely watches baseball, so the Giants have always been a thing between me and Mom — I assumed it was an old memory misplaced on a new day. But it turned out that Sunday game did overlap with the hours she had been out, and a month or so later my dad got a credit card bill with the charge for the ticket. I can’t tell you when Mom cheered or if she managed to find her seat. All I know is Clayton Kershaw struck out seven, the Giants had five hits, and even though I’ve committed these statistics to memory, I still like On the chance that this hasn’t been clubbed into your head by now, the Giants have won the World Series in every The disease doesn’t take people from you in a day or a week or a season. You get years of steady disappearance, with an indeterminate end. So for me and Mom and baseball, this decade has been a long goodbye. Like everyone who roots for a baseball team, I remember life events by connecting them to games. At first that meant sharing many moments of heartbreak: through the 1980s, the ’90s and the year 2000. Things looked better in 2002, when the Giants led the Angels, 5-0, in Game 6 of the World Series. But then I made the rookiest of sports fan errors: I called Mom to celebrate before heading to a bar. The Angels rallied to take the game and On Oct. 7, 2010, the Giants entered the playoffs for the first time in seven years. That evening my then-fiancée and I boarded a flight from New York to Phoenix, where our parents were going to meet ahead of our wedding. I dreaded the gathering because Mom’s disturbing lapses were becoming harder to ignore, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to explain them to anyone. This stress was temporarily relieved by the airplane’s seat-back TV, on which I watched Tim Lincecum The next night at dinner, when Mom told my future father-in-law the same story over and over, I felt torn between the courtesy of telling my new family what was up, and a duty to my mother’s wishes. At least my phone showed the Giants with a 4-0 lead, which, naturally, But the Giants won that series, then made it past the Phillies. And on Nov. 1, when Game 5 and the World Series were Mom got worse the next year. Our frequent emailing became less so, and on June 6, 2011, she sent me a final note, a single sentence with a misspelling, telling me that Lincecum had recorded his The Giants made the playoffs again the next year, but I was still terrified of the ghosts of 2002. I countered them by spending a good bit of the postseason wearing a That off-season, as Mom declined further, my baseball superstitions started working in reverse. One day at work I looked up the July 29 box score and spent a few minutes scratching statistics with my mouse arrow. I wondered if there might be some hidden meaning in them. The loss had seemed so devastating in the moment, but now it was the precursor to a postseason Maybe that suggested something special about the clinical trial Mom was in. Maybe it was the miracle drug. This led to a semi-recurring fantasy of my mother on “The Oprah Winfrey Show”: Alzheimer’s is cured! But two years later, when the Giants won their Now it’s another even year, and the Giants are grinding through a tight playoff race. Mom’s decline is further on: This month she left the Noe Valley house for a memory facility nearby. I’ve learned never to say never, but even an improbable Giants run seems unlikely to dislodge my favorite baseball memory: a late July loss when Mom walked out of the house, made it to the Giants’ park and bought herself a ticket.