This is written by someone who dealt with his grandmother's AD growing up, and whose family proclivity makes him feel especially vulnerable. In addition to having written his own novel about the subject, in this article he talks about a number of other works of literature in which the disease plays an important role.
I found his description of the novel "We Are Not Ourselves" to be especially evocative of my last 10 years with Jeff. Don't know if I can stand to actually read the novel, but this is a good article!
Thank you so much Emily for putting up that New Yorker link. It is indeed a good article exploring a world we all know in our own way already by examining the books of others exploring the same subject as he is.
The writer impressed me greatly by the nuance with which he pulls out the threads of the different ideas and in my mind shows a deep understanding himself of what he is seeing. It's also a joy to be in the hands of a truly talented writer which Mr Block certainly is in his article.
It's immediately recognizable that the motivation would be fear and that no solutions exist yet in the article Mr Block does not shy from the truths about the needs of perception versus the reality of the fact.
The fact is that a child who does not yet have self awareness and cannot speak or understand words is wholly formed as a person already and it is the secondary levels of communication that create the nuance of the person we then know. A child brought up without a single thing shown to it or said to it is what a human being actually is. All else is civilization and conceptualization which must be taught generation through generation or it is lost.
They have a mirror test for self awareness. The parent sticks a small colored adhesive onto the childs face and then the child is guided to look into the full length mirror. If the child sees the adhesive and touches her own face she is self aware. Somewhere around 2 -3 is normal.
It's everything after that which makes that toddler a social, speaking, needy, and interacting individual that I believe is lost and I believe you need EOAD where the person does not succumb to any sudden crisis to eventually prove that.
People who get AD in their seventies generally regress more slowly and the natural number of conditions and the longer run on the body's normal lifecycle both interfere and are the subject of a different societal conceit which I might sum up as they're old already.
It's the EOAD type that gets to run it's course and finish before normal lifespans and I believe that Dianne is at roughly the same stage as the 2 year old who is self aware but has no other means to think with or communicate with. That 2 year old is however many times more aware of anything let alone herself.
My own view is that AD resides in a recessive gene. My wife's family has zero history of AD. Blue eyes are a recessive gene. Both my parents had blue eyes and so did my sister but my eyes are green. That's because both my parents passed that recessive gene on to my sister but in me one of them did not which is the usual case.
I think on the part of the topic about the awareness of the AD patient it's extremely difficult for people to accept both the science of the disease and the evidence. Because once that young child in front of the mirror is self aware she is going to start absorbing at an accelerated rate and it won't take long for a personality to emerge and then develop in nuance throughout her life. That 'personality' is grafted directly onto the child that is already there.
I think it's there that many have such difficulty. All of my wife's memories and personality are here now. They are in her brain at the NH. It's the machine which must work in harmony with complexity that is rusting shut progressively in random ways in her brain. And so much damage is done now to what needs to be a finely tuned instrument in the dimmest among us, that she has virtually no personality to access.
Mr Block understands. I can see it in the points he's made and how he's made them. But he doesn't accept yet. He understands it. It's clear in the article. But I didn't watch him accept that his journey of understanding is complete and so I wonder if he will write a third book about it.
Anyway, my two cents. I peeked at your blog. Sounds like all is well. You have stupid tax laws. All the best.
Who checks for the marriage license? No one. Many now marry in all but name. Why not marry in all but license? You marry in philosophy and in word - you just don't have the badge.
Why not name yourselves husband and wife and introduce yourselves like that and be everything in that?
There's a line in that Mel Brooks western spoof "Badges??? We don't need no stinking badges!"
Emily, thank you for posting this. Wolf, thank you for your astute analysis. The article is very well written and cohesive; I just don't think I can read any fiction about Alzheimer's right now. The reality is too close!