Alan Dienstag — Alzheimer's and the Spiritual Terrain of Memory
Alzheimer's disease has been described as "the great unlearning." But what does it reveal about the nature of human identity? What remains when memory unravels?
onbeing.org
DR. DIENSTAG: I was working with a woman whose husband was in a nursing home. And there’s that period of time when people with Alzheimer’s begin to not recognize their family members. And it’s wrenching and it’s painful and it’s awful. It’s just awful. And she was in that period of time, and so it would happen every so often. The first time it happened, she came back to me in kind of a panic and just — she was distraught and said that she didn’t want to live anymore if he wasn’t going to recognize her. What started to happen was that she would go and see him, and the first thing she would say was, “Do you remember who I am?” And I was trying to convince her and trying to help her to kind of back off of that.
MS. TIPPETT: Right.
DR. DIENSTAG: I was suggesting to her that there are other ways that she could see that he recognizes her. And there are, in fact. Even when someone can’t answer that question, you can see on their face, you can see in their body language. There are lots of ways that you can tell. But he got to a certain point where he just couldn’t answer the question. And one day, she went in and she asked him, and he looked at her and he said, “I don’t know who you are, but I love you.” And I thought, oh, he thought of the right answer.
MS. TIPPETT: He did. He also understood what she needed to hear.
DR. DIENSTAG: He totally understood. And, again, I just — that was very wise. That was very wise. And on another level, I thought a lot about it, and I thought, what endures? What endures? Does the name endure? Does the recognition endure? To me, that’s a statement about that love is enduring, actually. Right? That you can hold onto that sometimes even after you’ve lost all the other things. So that one has stayed with me. I mean, some of these things just feel to me like principles for living a good life. Right?
