Alzheimer's: George Will's column

Poststructural Pub
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George Will is probably my favorite conservative. I’ve disagreed with him more often than not, but I always learn from reading his stuff. Once in a blue moon, he writes a column about some aspect of his personal life. He wrote a piece on the occasion of his son’s 30th birthday. His son has Down Syndrome. It was the most unsentimentally moving thing I’ve read in years. Now he has a recent column on his mother’s death and the family’s struggle with her Alzheimer’s disease. It has the same restrained beauty as his piece on his son.

Anyway, you must read it now. That is all.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/12/AR2006071201873.html

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Never mind.

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Flyingcursor wrote:

So does restrained beauty allow mental health posts? I wont’ read it because when I had a real problem and wanted to share with my C&F friends my post was deleted. And I sent PM’s that were never answered.
Maybe I didn’t have enough unrestrained beauty.

I don’t look at this as a mental health post, in the sense that a member is posting to ask advice about his/her own condition or that of a friend. Rather, Dale is simply sharing a sensitively written piece about a problem that at one time or another we all need to confront.

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Never mind.

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A very beautiful piece of writing.

My own mother died tweny seven years ago of an inoperable brain tumour.
I can still see those huge brown eyes sparkle with delight as she spoke to me of things that happened before I was born, as if they had happened only that very day.
Her last days were spent , in her own mind, in a far better place than a hospice for terminally ill people.

There is nothing “Medical” in this link.

Just a sad truth that comes to us all.

Slan,
D.

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My maternal grandmother spent her last weeks wacked out on morphine as cancer of the colon devoured her. The nurses would laugh, as she would sing at the top of her lungs old English street balads from the the years before WWI, and then demand the nurses go to the window and “tell them boys singing in the street to stop making so much noise”. There’s lots of ways to lose your mind, and often its preferable, I think, to staying home.

djm

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If you cannot see the difference between posting a link to the George Will column and what is disallowed at this site, then there is nothing we can do to explain it to you adequately.

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Related](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060716.whealth0716/BNStory/Front/home%22%3ERelated) story about genetically inherited form of dementia. Timely, perhaps.

djm

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I don’t mean to invalidate her or her family’s struggle but,
she lived to 98 and

To the end, even when virtually without speech, Louise could recognize her children, could enjoy music and being read to from love letters written 75 years ago by Fred, her future husband.

When my father’s mother’s Alzheimer’s disease finally got to the point that she couln’t hide it from us any more I had her move in with my two teen age kids and me (my parents lived next door but they already had my mother’s mother living with them and my father was experiencing a slow painful death of his own).

A short time later, though Grannie still appeared physically able she lost all memory of who she or we were. She recognised no one.
The only family member she ever talked about was the baby sister she’d been given to care for as a child.
Occasionally she mentioned to people (if I wasn’t in the room) that she thought I might be her.

Over the next 2 years her mobility deteriorated and (when both she and my son came down with pneumonia) we finally had to put her in a convalescent center where she lived for another 8 years.

She could even laugh, in spite of the tormenting chasm between her remaining cognition and the prison of her vanished ability to articulate.

The convalescent center Grannie was at was a good one.
The staff seemed very caring.
The decor was bright and cheerful.
They kept the patients who might still able to escape on the second floor.

A lot of the patients seemed to have lost all ablity to communicate except say cuss words.

Grannie wasn’t one of those but it did start me wondering.
When the children of the patients who lost everything but the ability to cuss would visit, they’d usually share that their parent had totally changed since developing Alzheimer’s disease, that they’d never or rarely used that kind of language before.

That’s what got me wondering.
Was it that their parent changed
or had they’d been of the mind set all their life to be vile but before Alzheimer’s had also made the choice to be nice.
(It is a choice for some of us.)

That presented another question to me.
Was it better to live life being naturally nice
or was it better to live life deciding to be nice?

Who owned living a life as a nice person more?
Was it someone who wouldn’t think of being anything but nice

or was it a person who knew great depths of cruelty but had chose not to live that way?

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I have no knowledge of this stuff myself, but that has been my impression as well, that the language is expressing hurt and frustration, not any intention to be cruel or hurtful to others. I doubt that the part of them that is expressing itself in such harsh terms is even aware of others existing around the person - that part just can’t hold back the frustration any longer, and is not aware the act is public, or even what the concept “public” is. From that, I would surmise it is an error to take any of it personally as some form of deliberate abuse. Perhaps Dale, as a professional, can help us understand how to deal with this kind of thing when we encounter it (?).

djm

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I don’t know if anyone is “naturally nice”. I’ve always thought that we were animals capable of doing terrible things and that we are socialized so that we don’t follow, or try not to anyway, our base impulses. I find myself making choices fairly often about how to behave. I don’t feel impulses to kill people I don’t think, but I recognize in myself impulses to yell at someone, or shove someone out of the way, or smack someone or say something hurtful. The impulse lasts just a second and then my trained behavior steps in and tells me to behave nicely and usually I’m able to control my mouth and I’m always able to control physical behavior. I’ve just assumed everyone had to deal with life in this way. I’m not sure whether someone who overcomes deeply cruel impulses “owns life” more than someone who overcomes less cruel impulses. It seems like that life would be harder and scarier. Is that the same as owning it more?


My grandmother was in a nursing home and something had clearly happened to her personality. I don’t know really if it was caused by actual brain changes or by her environment.

She was very loving to me, even though I think she may not have been exactly clear about who I was, but she was very mean-spirited toward all the other people living there. She called some people foul-mouthed names. She used words I had no idea she knew.

That was very, very difficult for me to see. I still do not know what to make of it. That behavior was so counter to anything I had witnessed in her before then. I found myself wondering if I had ever known my grandmother at all.

I think that, since I had mostly seen my grandmother when I was little, I had formed an idea of her as being a saint. That is how she seemed to me. The most wonderful grandmother in the world.

And then when I saw her in the nursing home, she was not functioning well, her self-restraint had broken down. When I was little I didn’t realize that she, like all of us, had to always be choosing to behave well. And she was able to do that until things went wrong in her mind. I still find myself wishing I had not heard certain things, but the “real” her is the one I knew when she was functioning properly.

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Nothing is ours, not our bodies, not our minds.

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I’ve got to keep reminding myself of that these days.

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I realize our mind, at most, interprets reality for us (based on DNA, subjective experience, what ever),
but isn’t how one deals with that reality (the coping strategies) a choice?

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No, I’m sorry, I can’t. And folks, please, again, a reminder: This is not a forum for asking for, or giving, or taking medical advice.

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Sorry, guy. Didn’t mean to put you on the spot. I thought that the topic was general enough not to fall under the “proscribed evil of medical advice” category. No harm intended.

djm