Fade to Light: One of the Most Terrifying Aspects of Alzheimer’s Is That Those Afflicted Can Seldom Tell Us What It Is Like
LOWELL JENKINS leans back in a rocking chair in his condominium, sixteen floors above the crossroads din of Yonge and Eglinton in Toronto. He is wearing a pink sweater against the threat of April rain, and tapping a pencil on the knee of his new jeans. A mug of black tea sits on the kitchen counter next to a tall glass of daffodils. But the golden years calm is illusory: Lowell is unsettled as he studies his decorated refrigerator. Below valentines from his grandchildren (“I Heart U Grandpa Longhair”) hangs a colour-coded image of the brain. “Something was bugging me,” he says. “I wanted to match some information with what was going on.”
Each lobe is described so briefly—the hippocampus is the area where Alzheimer’s disease starts—that for Lowell the image is less instructive than it is a blunt reminder, a signpost he passes repeatedly whenever he is in a roaming mood. Now seventy-eight, he is approaching five years since his Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
“I’m an example of the more pronounced…” he says. “Hmm.” With both hands, he holds the pencil horizontal at his chin, his thumb and forefinger pinching the eraser: “See how it gets in there? ” For the retired social work professor, broken ideas are anathema. He has never needed so much time to locate the right words; nor is he accustomed to having the search turn up nothing. “You think you’ve got things under control, or at least managed, and then you find you don’t even… you can’t…” After several beats, he asks what we were talking about. I point to the brain on the fridge: “I was just curious about that.”
“Me, too,” he says. “I’m trying to understand what’s happening to me.”