Still Alice

I picked up this really great book at the airport on my way to Indianapolis last week, Still Alice by Lisa Genova.

This is a haunting novel about a 50 year old Harvard professor of cognitive psychology who finds out she has early onset Alzheimer's. The story, told from her perspective, allows you to listen to her thoughts as her brain rapidly deteriorates. You get to experience her palpable horror as she realizes what she isn't going to be able to realize for much longer.

There are chilling moments in the text, a couple that stood out to me so much that I dog-eared the pages. One is this moment in the hospital, when her daughter visits:

"...Alice looked at Lydia in pieces, close-up snapshots of her features. She recognized each one like people recognize the house they grew up in, a parent's voice, the creases of their own hands, instinctively, without effort or conscious consideration. But strangely, she had a hard time identifying Lydia as a whole. "You're so beautiful," said Alice. "I'm so afraid of looking at you and not knowing who you are."

"I think that even if you don't know who I am someday, you'll still know that I love you."

"What if I see you, and I don't know that you're my daughter, and I don't know that you love me?"

"Then I'll tell you that I do, and you'll believe me."

Alice liked that. But will I always love her? Does my love for her reside in my head or my heart? The scientist in her believed that emotion resulted from complex limbic brain circuitry, circuitry that was for her, at this very moment, trapped in the trenches of a battle in which there would be no survivors. The mother in her believed that the love she had for her daughter was safe from the mayhem in her mind, because it lived in her heart....."

I also loved the passage in which Alice yells at her weak-of-character husband:

"I don't think I can do it, Alice. I'm sorry, I just don't think I can take being home for a whole year, just sitting and watching what this disease is stealing from you. I can't take watching you not knowing how to get dressed and not knowing how to work the television. If I'm in a lab, I don't have to watch you sticking Post-It notes on all the cabinets and doors. I can't just stay home and watch you get worse. It kills me."

"No John, it's killing me, not you. I'm getting worse, whether you're home looking at me or hiding in your lab. You're losing me. I'm losing me. But if you don't take next year off with me, well, then, we lost you first. I have Alzheimer's. What's your fucking excuse?"

There are so many great moments in this book I can't list them all. You'll have to read it for yourself.

This story made me realize that, for me, this would be a fate worse than death. To imagine that there might be moments of lucidity where I would realize what I had lost....I can completely understand Alice's desire to plan to take her own life when she reached a certain point of memory loss.

Would I want to live if I couldn't make my thoughts clear? Does life, for me, have any meaning outside of my cognition? Would I still be able to trust in God if I couldn't even remember how to spell god? Right now I would say absolutely not.

If one of my parents had Alzheimer's and wanted to die, would my instinct be to entertain that idea, or to keep them with me for as long as I could? I guess I would have to believe that God has a purpose in Alzheimer's. It's not a disease that kills you physically, so there has to be a reason why God would want you to go on living without your memories or ability to think logically.

Great idea for a story, and wonderfully executed.