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So far this year, I’ve read two books with characters who have Alzheimer’s disease. This wasn’t planned; it just happened that these books came across my path and I read them. The first is a real book with paper pages and a hard cover, and the character is an old woman whose memory is jagged and fragmented, bits and pieces of time that come to her suddenly and then go away the same way.
The character in the other book (which I’m currently reading on Kindle) is a much younger woman with early-onset Alzheimer’s, an entirely different strain of the disease. She drifts away from her family so gradually, and at such a young age, that if anything it’s a more frustrating situation for her and everyone around her. It’s also inherited, and one of the narrative threads in the novel (and there are several) is the search for her lineage, after she’s too far gone to talk about it.
The point is that as I’ve read this second book and become familiar with the character, and more and more people with the disease are portrayed, some of them seem, especially in the early stages, not that different from me. And so I started to wonder about myself. Now, I know I don’t have the disease. For one thing, I’m about fifteen or twenty years beyond the age it would have appeared if I did. But I’m always susceptible to suggestion, and it is something to think about.
Well, you know, this is why we read fiction, isn’t it? To dive so deeply into the lives of others that we forget for a time who we are. (Or is that just a symptom?) In the end, I think it turns all the way around to the point where we learn more about ourselves, so it really illuminates who we are. At least, that’s the reason I’m reading three novels at one time right now, and enjoying them all. |
