Several hundred Amarillo residents are going for a walk Saturday.

It’s an annual event here, as it is in communities all across the country. They’ll walk to call attention to Alzheimer’s disease. I won’t be among them that day, as I’ll be working.

However, my heart is with them. All of them. I want them to raise money and to keep raising money to fight a killer disease with which my family and I have intimate knowledge.

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Thirty years ago this week, my dear mother died quietly in her sleep. Her death certificate lists pneumonia as the cause of her death.

Alzheimer’s disease was the real culprit.

Mom was 61. She’d been in failing health for several years. A doctor diagnosed her officially with Alzheimer’s disease only four years earlier but in reality she’d been exhibiting symptoms for years prior to that diagnosis.

Her behavior was changing. She was losing her cognitive skill. She lost them one at a time. The ability to sign her own name. The ability to drive a car. She couldn’t cook meals. Eventually she couldn’t bathe herself. She couldn’t dress herself. Near the end she couldn’t speak and was reduced to making strange murmuring noises.

Those who have witnessed their loved ones vanish in this manner before their eyes understand this fundamental truth about Alzheimer’s disease: It afflicts the caregiver far more than the patient. Mom was unaware of her surroundings, of those who loved her. She didn’t know when she lapsed in and out of lucidity. But we knew it. It broke our hearts.

Alzheimer’s disease hasn’t captured the public’s imagination the way, say, AIDS or various forms of cancer have gobbled up so much of the world’s attention. Why? I guess it’s because its victims generally are older and that its not the result of unhealthy behavior. It strikes people without warning or cause.

It struck Mom that way, just as it strikes those who’ve been diagnosed with this merciless, cruel disease.

Our nation is aging. That means more Americans will suffer from this terrible affliction.

My wish — as always — is that modern medicine can find a cure, a vaccine to eradicate Alzheimer’s disease.

The Saturday walk at Sam Houston Park will raise money toward that end.

My prayer today is that the money raised will put researchers over the top in their hunt for a cure that ends the scourge of Alzheimer’s disease.