Opinion/Brown: When Alzheimer’s steals the mind of someone you love, not all is lost
When the mind fades, what is left?
The summer was just beginning when I first met Times columnist Saralee Perel. Here was this delightful woman, well-loved, writing for the same newspaper — and we’d never met. Shame on me.
Saralee’s readers know all about her husband’s struggle with Alzheimer’s. As we became friends, my wife and I met Bob, the love of Saralee’s life, experienced his sweet smile and saw them together. Whenever we meet, I always ask — and hear the same answer. The center of her universe is imploding in slow motion, right before her eyes.
We had lunch recently and Saralee gave me a long look.
“I’m having trouble remembering what he was like before,” she said.
My wife and I are old now and, as we get even older, we occasionally revisit the most difficult conversation of our lives. Death. Separation. We’ve decided the lucky one gets to go first. But if the person we love more than anyone in the world fades away an inch at a time, it’s hard to know who suffers more. It seems to us that if cognition fades, how can we still suffer — but maybe cognition isn’t everything. And maybe language isn’t either.
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Years ago, I watched my father fade away in much the same way. I’d sit on the edge of his bed and feed him dinner with a spoon. Sometimes he knew who I was; sometimes he didn’t. At times, it seemed he was an astronaut taking a spacewalk on a long tether. Each time, he drifted further and further away, for longer and longer. I wondered if he was practicing. Always a cautious man, I think he was trying eternity on for size until one morning, he finally cut the cord and drifted off for good. His eyes never even opened.
But I got to come home to my wife when it was done.
“Thus,” it is written, “a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.”
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I sit with my friend and realize she’s enduring an extended kind of crucifixion. What is love after all but wanting to be with someone? Dogs and pussycats with brains the size of walnuts know how to love in this elemental way. Even if it’s just to feel someone’s warmth, even if it’s just to hear them breathing. If we have these things, we can be all right. Be kept away and the discomfort grows worse the longer our separation lasts.
Among other things, we talked of the soul. I’ll bet there are a lot of our readers at similar points in life. Intellectually, we know there’s a difference between soul and mind. It just becomes a lot harder to imagine the soul when the mind has fled. English grammar doesn’t help. We say we “have” a soul like we have a wallet or a Social Security number. It can’t be like that. If there’s anything to this, we are a soul. The real question is why we have a body. Why are we in the flesh?
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Football players suit up to play. Deep sea divers suit up to dive. Maybe souls suit up to come to Earth. We know our body suits wear out. Sometimes our bodies fail first; sometimes our minds do. There’d be no point to any of this if our deepest and longest-lasting selves were powerless and mute.
After all our parents were gone, my wife and I went to see a psychic. You may not believe in any of this, but this lady knew who’d had cancer — and what kind — and the names of people and even how many grandchildren we had.
When the psychic mentioned two grandchildren, we had to correct her. We had only one.
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“Ah, no,” she said, “your Aunt Louise is standing behind me grinning. And she’s wiggling two fingers in the air.”
Thanksgiving was coming and my daughter planned to tell us then. But instead, we heard it from our dead Aunt Louise who’d died of Alzheimer’s in Quebec. For at least her last year, she never said a word. Yet here she was, her old self, still keeping an eye on folks she loved.
Believe it or don’t as you will, but this is my sense of it: That which is eternal in us gives itself in love to that which is temporal will pass away. But not for long. That is our hope.
Meanwhile, if you read Saralee and love her work, she’ll keep telling you what’s going on — and might even make you smile. This wouldn’t be a bad time to write her back and tell her what that means to you. She’s in the midst of life’s hardest thing.
Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email him at columnresonse@gmail.com.
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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: As a loved one's mind fades due to Alzheimer's here's what's left
