Still Alice

One of my Christmas presents was the DVD of the film of this name. I had never heard of either the film or of any of the people in it, but it was none the worse for that. One of those emotional family films which the Americans are rather good at. Tear jerking even (for the ladies, that is).

The story of a happy family in which the mother catches something called familial Alzheimer’s disease in middle age. A disaster compounded by it rapidly turning out that at least one of her three children have it. The redeeming good news being that the unborn grandchildren don't.

I thought that the film had quite a fair stab at showing what such a diagnosis might be like, both for the person concerned and for the surrounding family.

Afterwards, I pondered about the merits of being told one has the disease, at a time when one has symptoms, but is still much the same person as one always was. For what it is worth, I decided that it was better to know. The down side is that you have to knowingly live with it, something you might otherwise, just possibly, have been spared. The up side is that you can better make helpful changes, adjustments to your life - and you can make preparations. You can, as they used to say, put your affairs in order, both as regards this world and the next.

The film itself has the down side for people of our age that we go through a hopefully short period of worrying more than we do already about such things as putting the butter in the microwave. Or, in the case of BH, of putting the olive flavoured margarine in the microwave. The up side that we have a bit more awareness and understanding of the whole sorry business. And one never knows which lot one is going to pull out of the urn; which of the deadly trio of heart, cancer and dementia is going to carry one off.

I am sure that I read a quote from Dr. Johnson quite recently which might have illustrated this post, but cannot now track it down, despite the wealth of same turned up by google. An entirely suitable senior moment for the occasion. Maybe I will even get around to reading the great man himself; at least one book of his has been sitting on the shelf unread for many years now. Drifting, I did once have the opportunity of buying his dictionary, which was tempting, but not tempting enough at £200 or so. From a fine secondhand bookshop which used to grace Crewkerne, now deceased. A shop which could also have sold me Holman Hunt's autobiography, also tempting, but not tempting enough. Not seen since. According to streetview, a shop called Gresham Books is still to be found at the right place, that is to say at 50.8833874,-2.7957175 - but it certainly wasn't there last time I looked. Perhaps google don't go round very often out in the provinces of the far west.

With thanks to http://www.alzinfo.org/ for the illustration actually used.

PS: I took a peek at Amazon but we decided to pass on the book from which the film was made.