Regional
(2008-09-08)
Listen Now:
GREELEY CO
(KUNC) -
null
The Alzheimer's Association is conducting Memory Walks throughout Colorado this month to raise money for Alzheimer care and research. KUNC commentator Dr. Marc Ringel says each of us has a role to play when it comes to helping those afflicted with the disease.
I just read a touching piece, one of an ongoing series written for a geriatrics journal by a man who has early Alzheimer's disease. The author still has enough of his wits about him to be able to describe his situation as like clinging to the sides of a funnel. He feels himself sliding inexorably into a narrower and narrower world, one in which he's not only constricted by his own disability, but by presuppositions of the people who care for him. He believes his well-intentioned caretakers are eager to jam him, a man who holds a PhD, into a group-singing, craft-making world of simple-minded recreation. This poor guy is clinging to the sides of his funnel for dear life, knowing full well where gravity will ultimately take him.
Once we reach middle age, every one of us lives in a funnel. The scope of our lives naturally narrows with advancing years. I've had to give up skiing, backpacking, and rollerblading, to choose a few not-very-tragic personal examples. I regret the losses and do my best to maintain myself through exercise, joint replacement, attitude adjustment, whatever it takes. My normal aging is happening at a pace that I can adapt to, with the support of family and the camaraderie of friends who are deteriorating at about the same rate as I. The sides of my funnel are not nearly so steep nor slippery as those of a person with Alzheimer's.
A veterinarian, who has served our dogs and cats with competence and love over the course of more than two decades, just closed his practice. At the age of 57, our pets' doctor has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Hundreds of customers and friends mourn the affliction of this wonderful man. I wonder how he's perceiving the walls of his particular funnel. Word is he's depressed.
Mercifully, self-perceptions appear to get less painful as Alzheimer's progresses. An article published last year in Dementia and Geriatric Cognitive Disorders found that, early in the course of mental decline, anxiety and depression increase significantly. Later, though, as the disease advances, emotional suffering diminishes, presumably with the loss of insight into what's gone missing.
Tertullian, a Roman philosopher who was born about 150 years after Christ, reasoned that there was no need to fear death because, While I live death is not and while death lives I am not. Loss of the rational mind may seem a sort of death. The hard part is when enough of consciousness is left for a person to experience death without oblivion and oblivion without death. That's where I'm afraid our vet is right now.
Westerners frame disease as an enemy to be fought. We applaud individual bravery in the course of battle, no matter how hopeless. Buddhists, on the other hand, say that clinging is the source of all suffering and counsel making peace with the inevitable.
Each of us who is lucky to live long enough will have to find our own way through the inevitability of disability and death. We may choose to grasp at the sides of our funnel or we may relax, as the further-gone demented appear to do, into the comfortable confines of a shrinking world.
It's the job of all of us who are still intact, to reach out and retard or smooth progress down the funnel for those we love, and mostly just to soothe and caress them. You might even say that we are the funnel.
© Copyright 2012, KUNC
