Wit Over Ignorance

All is not lost

When my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's several years ago, we pretty much knew what to expect. My sister is an expert on ageing, has worked in several old age homes, and has since become a regional representative of the Alzheimer's Society. Yet still the old bag managed to surprise us.

The first thing you learn about Alzheimer's is that while it is incurable, it doesn't actually kill you. Ma will be 86 in August, and is showing every sign that she'll get to be 100 and earn her telegram from the Queen (or email, or tweet, or whatever Buckingham Palace sends out these days). She's physically frail, and has given us a couple of scares in recent months, but given that she smoked like a chimney for 60 years, it's frankly a miracle that she can still draw a breath.

Instead, Alzheimer's steadily takes away pretty much everything that makes life worth living - memory, family, peace. It's a scary and sometimes violent affliction. We were lucky in that the rate of Ma's decline was much slower than the norm; but now she's mostly lost to dementia, and mostly lost to us.

There's still a spark, though, some vestige of her past life that somehow glints through the fog. As we talked during a recent visit, I was never sure that she knew quite who I was, or even what it meant to have a son (the one advantage of Alzheimer's is that among the many things she has forgotten is that she used to be a smoker). I took a few photographs, and when I looked at them afterwards there was a full range of her ever-shifting expressions, some too sad or cruel to reproduce here. But there was also something I used to see a great deal of, especially when I was a child. She has an irresistible smile.

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All is not lost

When my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's several years ago, we pretty much knew what to expect. My sister is an expert on ageing, has worked in several old age homes, and has since become a regional representative of the Alzheimer's Society. Yet still the old bag managed to surprise us.

The first thing you learn about Alzheimer's is that while it is incurable, it doesn't actually kill you. Ma will be 86 in August, and is showing every sign that she'll get to be 100 and earn her telegram from the Queen (or email, or tweet, or whatever Buckingham Palace sends out these days). She's physically frail, and has given us a couple of scares in recent months, but given that she smoked like a chimney for 60 years, it's frankly a miracle that she can still draw a breath.

Instead, Alzheimer's steadily takes away pretty much everything that makes life worth living - memory, family, peace. It's a scary and sometimes violent affliction. We were lucky in that the rate of Ma's decline was much slower than the norm; but now she's mostly lost to dementia, and mostly lost to us.

There's still a spark, though, some vestige of her past life that somehow glints through the fog. As we talked during a recent visit, I was never sure that she knew quite who I was, or even what it meant to have a son (the one advantage of Alzheimer's is that among the many things she has forgotten is that she used to be a smoker). I took a few photographs, and when I looked at them afterwards there was a full range of her ever-shifting expressions, some too sad or cruel to reproduce here. But there was also something I used to see a great deal of, especially when I was a child. She has an irresistible smile.