Battling Alzheimer

Warning:  If you believe in God then you might find these thoughts contrary to your beliefs.

Another Warning: If you don’t believe in God then you might find these thoughts contrary to your beliefs. 

There are some events that make us question humanity in general, like Josef Fritzl, who held his own daughter captive for 20 plus years, fathered seven children by her, killed one and then raised three of them as his grandchildren.   We shake our collective heads and wonder why people have taken to shooting at high schools and colleges across our nation.  The latest shooting early Wednesday morning, April 30, 2008, at Florida Atlantic University has the school on lockdown.  These are horrible events, but for most of us, they are distant.

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Alzheimer’s disease involves pride and self-esteem - and not just for the elderly. I heard of a study, perhaps not scientific, where teenagers were treated like elderly people (ignored, disrespected, you get the picture) and began showing signs of mental confusion. When you lose self-esteem, you lose more than that.

But the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease can hurt your pride (pride is bad) as well as your self-esteem (self-esteem is good). Patients ask, “How could this have happened to me?” and a million other questions. Loved ones ask, “How could she say that to me?” They mean that what’s happening doesn’t fit the exalted view they have of themselves.

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After she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, my grandmother never became violent or extremely angry. She had lived with some angry people, apparently, and I think she decided she couldn’t win by out-raging them. She eventually found other ways of dealing with conflict. She was involved in some family violence, but nobody ever told me if she hit back.

Most of the things that made her angry would have made other people angry. Her daughter had been mistreated by a husband a few decades earlier: time to let that go, but certainly a reason for anger. Siblings had fought over the family inheritance: also time to let that go, though she had reason for resentment. Though she didn’t remember the inheritance negotiations accurately, it’s probably true that they could have been more fair to her. She remembered the feelings of unfairness but not the details. So she reacted to and reconstructed the events according to her memory and her feelings.

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By Julie Redstone

The fact that there is a greater incidence today of Alzheimer’s disease than in previous centuries has not gone unnoticed by some observers who seek to account for its increased presence among the aging, one that occurs at great personal cost and with grave consequences for families and loved ones.

The primary cost of Alzheimer’s disease lies in the loss of ‘presentness’ it brings to the one so afflicted – an increasing absence of the known and familiar self from awareness, reflection, and memory, and an increased departure of the interactive self from relationships that have been significant in the past. Indeed, the loss of presentness that comes with Alzheimer’s disease is so great, and the sadness it brings to those who feel they are losing a dear parent, friend, or partner so pervasive, that it is important to try to find a spiritual meaning and purpose for the sequence of deterioration that seems to strip one down to the bare bones of humanity, with sometimes even that being in question due to the deterioration of physical as well as mental and emotional functioning.

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