COLUMN: Alzheimer's cruel toll

From Michael Feng's, "Snuffles," Fall '99 From Michael Feng's, "Snuffles," Fall '99The time that my grandaunt accused me of stealing $100 from her purse was the first inkling I had that something was very wrong. To me, she had always been the cheerful old lady who lived by herself in a big house in Queens, which she knew like the back of her hand. Every time we went to visit her, I was impressed by her spirited independence and even more so by her ox-tail soup. It was because of mere forgetfulness that my grandaunt began living with my family. Looking back, we never considered for a second that the forgetfulness we attributed to old age could warp into the hell known as Alzheimer's disease. She grew increasingly moody, paranoid that everyone was stealing from her one day and inconsolably apologetic the next. Her personality gradually disappeared until she was unrecognizable as the grandaunt I always knew. For days on end, she stared into nothingness, trapped in a private world from which she was unable to escape. Today, unable to control even the basic functions of life, she lives in a total-care nursing home in California, waiting to die. In the frenzy of college, few of us give old age even the least thought. And when we do, we take for granted that old age is a trade-off. Though our physical selves will invariably deteriorate, we can take comfort in a lifetime's worth of accumulated memories and wisdom. The tragedy of Alzheimer's is that it does away with the trade-off. It steals the mind, the one thing we believe will last until our dying day. To this day, the ghost that my grandaunt has become haunts me. Is this, the husk of the woman she once was, the fruit of her 80 years of life? Over the course of that life, my grandaunt accomplished more than any other person I know. She graduated from Oxford, immigrated to America by herself, became a millionaire and still had time to paint beautiful watercolors and cook sumptuous ox-tail soup. Yet what use is the Oxford degree or the millions she earned to her now? The most vivid memory I have of my grandaunt is of her standing in the library of her Queens home. It was really just a few bookcases, but the rumpled condition of the books attested to the fact that she had read them all, some several times. Whenever I happened to randomly pick out a book from the library, she invariably came out of the kitchen to explain to me what she had learned from reading it. She never directly told me to love books, but she never had to. The sparkle in her eyes when she spoke of topics ranging from Adam Smith to Szechuan cooking was example enough to pique my interest. And even in the midst of her battle with Alzheimer's, in the days of ephemeral consciousness when a spark of life revisited her eyes, she would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up. Invariably, she'd forget and ask me again. But I never minded, because I knew she was trying her best to teach me, to mold me into a better person. Though her defeated form bears no trace of it, that energetic spirit to whom nothing was impossible is still alive. From something as profound as a love for books or as simple as an appreciation for ox-tail soup, her legacy burns undimmed in me. She has taught me that the only lasting impression I will leave on this world is the knowledge and morals that I instill in my descendants.