Alzheimer's: emotional and spiritual meaning

What Alzheimer's is

Alzheimer's disease is a degeneration of the brain. Recent memory goes first. Confusion, difficulty finding words, and trouble recognising people follow. It is the commonest cause of dementia. Age is the largest risk. It is not a decision to leave the world, and it is not a mood that wore the memory out. A clinician looks for other causes of confusion, some of which can be reversed. Medicines may slow certain symptoms for a time. Company, routine, and safety matter as much as any drug.

The emotional meaning of Alzheimer's

Spiritually, this is a long inability to face a reality that frightens and hurts, and a numbing towards other people and towards one's own feelings. Life is made to seem easier by stunning oneself. There can be the fear of no longer being loved, of being forgotten, and then a forgetting of who one is. Having suffered enough that nothing more should be felt is the sentence the pages keep. Not having been recognised in life, often in relation to a mother, is set beside no longer recognising other people now. These are questions a family may recognise in a life. They are not the reason the cells changed.

What the illness shows is a failing memory, mental confusion, speech that will not come clearly, sometimes anger, and a manner that can look like a child's. Despair, irritability, and a sickness of living are read as the turn inward, into a bubble, a slow separation from the rest of the world. The flight the spiritual interpretation names is away from the adult world: recent memory drops, and an older memory remains. A person can look balanced for a long time while withdrawing through despair, anger, or frustration.

Attention, in this picture, sits on the past. Short-term memory is what wastes, because nothing new is being let in. Old ideas are hard to set down because there are so many of them. The illness usually comes late. Retirement is one scene: a life of being useful, of having power and responsibilities, becomes a life that feels useless, powerless, and dependent, in feeling, in body, and in money. The wish is to turn the clock back, to a childhood when death, the future, and responsibility were not yet fears.

Blood flow and brain tissue are involved medically. the spiritual interpretation's claim that an emotional shock withdraws blood from regions of the brain, and that the body is preparing someone to depart, does not belong on this page. Extreme fear of ageing can be real. It does not occult the present on purpose, and it does not choose a childish manner so that old wishes can finally be lived. Love and steady support are what the person needs. They do not restore the memory.

A gentler way to hold it

• Stay with one present moment: a name, a song, a hand.
• If you are the one who is afraid of being forgotten, say so to someone who can hear it.
• Ask for help with the care. The illness is not a bubble you are required to interpret alone.