Looking at Alzheimer's through "Still Alice"
My nani began losing her mind at 80. Up until then she was a sprightly woman who would think nothing of discussing sex with her grandchildren, her large-hearted guffaw to hand. In old age, she had suffered from colon cancer and had been bed-ridden after a nasty fall but none of those things had affected her spirit. Alzheimer's, however, took her away.
She was with us, that is, at our home, when the first signs appeared. She would mistake my mother - her daughter - for a daughter-in-law and ask me pointed questions on how I was treated in the house. It was funny initially, as she sat me down and whispered conspiratorially: "If she does not feed you well, you tell me. This is my house."
She would sometimes forget my father and this would result in hilarious cross-connections. At one time, she thought ma was living in sin with another man. "Does he keep you happy?" nani asked her, and I remember ma wept later because to her this was a sign that her mother would not be around for long. I was young at the time and unaware of the full import of the illness so I was just thrilled that my nani was absolutely cool about her daughter living with someone who was not her husband as long as he kept her happy.
In time, however, the illness got worse. Nani would think nana, my grandfather, was still alive and would tell us to go fetch him for dinner. She would remember things from the distant past, like her childhood in Pakistan, and speak as if her family - her brother, in particular, to whom she was close - were still alive and just round the corner.
Most of all she referred to Baby masi, who had stayed all her life with nani due to mental retardation brought on by a childhood fever, as though Baby were still a child. She once told my other masi with whom she was staying at the time: "Go fetch Baby. She is playing downstairs. It's getting dark." Baby had been dead for a year by then.
Nothing is more tragic about Alzheimer's than this progressive loss of the self. Nani had always talked to herself before falling asleep but with Alzheimer's she had a new world of riches to tap into, a world that could no longer be called memory, since she was living it as if it were the present. While she was losing herself to us, her caregivers, she had also perhaps found herself, in returning to an infantile state where only her most cherished thoughts found place.
I am thinking of nani because I have just gotten off watching Still Alice, director duo Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland's movie about early onset Alzheimer's. Early onset Alzheimer's affects about five per cent of all Alzheimer's patients and strikes before 65, the age when most patients begin to show symptoms. Julianne Moore, who plays the titular character, won a Bafta for her performance on Sunday night, that win topping her Golden Globe win last month and setting the stage for an Oscar win later this month.
Alice is a world-renowned professor of linguistics at Columbia who discovers she has early onset Alzheimer's. She notices that she has been forgetting words during speech and, on one occasion, was unable to identify her whereabouts. When she visits the doctor, she learns about her illness and that it is familial, which means there is a 50-50 chance that each of her three children will also get it.The children are Anna, Tom and Lydia, grown-ups with their own lives - working or failed romances and prospects of professional success. Alice's relationship with her children is distilled primarily through Lydia (Kristen Stewart) who is struggling to find her feet in theatre.
The directors chart the slow-moving progression of Alzheimer's with heartbreaking accuracy as Alice begins to forget first minor details such as a bread pudding recipe and then more pertinent facts of her life and herself. In one scene, she and her husband John (Alec Baldwin) are sitting in an ice cream parlour overlooking Columbia, and John asks her: "Do you recognize that building?" Alice says no.
The movie could easily have turned mawkish but it is to the film makers' credit that they maintain a steady eye on Alice's descent into mental solitariness. Part of the horror of Alzheimer's is the awareness on the patient's part that she is losing her mind and must prepare herself for the oncoming abyss. Alice, when she was better, made a video of herself addressing the later, befuddled Alice, giving her precise instructions to overdose herself. When that moment arrives, Alice II wishes to follow her erstwhile self's instructions but the mental haze that Alice I wanted to save her from precludes any action.
Towards the end, Lydia has given up on her LA dreams and returned to New York to care for her mother. When Alice was well, she had kept goading her daughter to start college and do something securely conventional. It is sweetly ironical then that it is the absence of ambition in Lydia that enables her to set home with her mother in her last days.
In the film's final scene, Lydia sits Alice down to read her an excerpt from Tony Kushner's Angles in America. By now Alice is in an unmitigated fog, a common characteristic of Alzheimer's patients in which they seem to constantly search for something. Alice's humanity - her own special self - is now truly dissipating. Lydia's choice of text to read to her mother is a nice touch by the directors who are a gay couple and are perhaps trying to briefly correlate the ravages of Alzheimer's to the havoc that AIDS wrought on a generation.
Lydia reads:
"Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America. God, it's been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet we'll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I'll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there's a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that's so."
Lydia moves next to her mother and says: "Did you like that? What I just read?" You can see the desperate wish on her face to hear a response - any response - from her fragile, lost mother. Alice mumbles incoherently: "Love."