Words&Dirt

“What should I be doing?  She took her medications, slept for six to seven hours a night, and clung to the normalcy of day-to-day life at Harvard.  She felt like a fraud, posing as a Harvard professor without a progressive neurodegenerative disease, working every day as if everything were just fine and would continue that way.

There weren’t a lot of metrics for performance or day-to-day accountability in the life of a professor.  She didn’t have books to balance, a certain quota of widgets to make, or written reports to hand in.  There was room for error, but how much?  Ultimately, her functioning would deteriorate to a level that would be noticed and not tolerated.  She wanted to leave Harvard before then, before the gossip and pity, but had no way of even guessing when that would be.

And although the thought of staying on too long terrified her, the thought of leaving Harvard terrified her much, much more.  Who was she if she wasn’t a Harvard psychology professor?

Should she try to spend as much time as possible with John and her children?  What would that mean practically?  Sit with Anna while she typed her briefs, shadow Tom on his rounds, observe Lydia in acting class?  How was she supposed to tell them that they had a 50 percent chance of going through this?  What if they blamed and hated her like she blamed and hated her father?

It was too soon for John to retire.  How much time could he realistically take off without killing his own career?  How much time did she have?  Two years?  Twenty?

Although Alzheimer’s tended to progress more quickly in the early-onset versus late-onset form, people with early-onset usually lived with the disease for many years longer, this disease of the mind residing in relatively young and healthy bodies.  She could stick around all the way to the brutal end.  She’d be unable to feed herself, unable to talk, unable to recognize John and her children.  She’d be curled up in the fetal position, and because she’d forget how to swallow, she’d develop pneumonia.  And John, Anna, Tom, and Lydia would agree not to treat it with a simple course of antibiotics, riddled with guilt over feeling grateful that something had finally come along that would kill her body.”

––Still Alice, by Lisa Genova, pg. 96-7

“When you cry for yourself, is it love––crying because you are lonely, because you have been left, because you are no longer powerful––complaining of your lot, your environment––always you in tears?  If you understand this, which means to come  in contact with it as directly as you would touch a tree or a pillar or a hand, then you will see that sorrow is self-created, sorrow is created by thought, sorrow is the outcome of time.  I had my brother three yeas ago, now he is dead, now I am lonely, aching, there is no one to whom I can look for comfort or companionship, and it brings tears to my eyes.

You can see all this happening inside yourself if you watch it.  You can see it fully, completely, in one glance, not take analytical time over it.  You can see in a moment the whole structure and nature of this shoddy little thing called ‘me’, my tears, my family, my nation, my belief, my religion––all that ugliness, it is all inside you.  When you see it with your heart, not with your mind, when you see it from the very bottom of your heart, then you have the key that will end sorrow.”

––Freedom from the Known, by Jiddu Krishnamurti, pg. 84