God with Dementia
At the beginning of the year, I went on a bit of a movie mini-binge with my family. The theme of the movie escapade: Alzheimer’s Disease.
The catalyst for this was the release on cable TV of The Father, starring Anthony Hopkins. The movie’s unique perspective came from its drawing us as the viewers into the experience of Alzheimer’s, as we start seeing events through the eyes of Hopkins eponymously named character as he sinks deeper into the disease.
Watching this movie followed the viewing of the 2006 movie Away from Her some years before. There, the movie looked at the fallout of Alzheimer’s on both patient and partner.
Building on that theme was my family’s watching of the 2019 movie Still Alice, which looks at the way in which the disease hits a much younger patient, and also how one person’s suffering of the disease radiates out to envelop every single family member, from partner to children to in-laws. You come to see not just the heartbreaking transformation of Alice from a brilliant young academic and mother to a mere shell who barely able to speak. You also get to see how Alice’s transformation is paralleled by the transformation in other members of the family, in ways that are both beautiful and dreadful. Stoicism gives way to fear in some and is later transformed into courage in others. Delinquents are redeemed and champions realise to their shame their own limitations in holding onto the ties that are meant to bind.
While The Father will have a staying power that is borne out of the intensity of the experience of dementia, I found that Still Alice stayed with me far longer. Almost six months after viewing the movie, I still catch myself thinking about it regularly.
Usually, the prompt is the song for the ending credits, Karen Elson’s moving acoustic cover of Lyle Lovett’s “If I had a boat”. The almost whimsical optimism of the lyrics starkly contrast with the bittersweetness of the movie’s ending, which is carried over in the song’s instrumental work.
Thinking of that song, however, would almost always lead me to thinking of the movie’s ending (Spoiler Alert). In the final scene, we see two figures that undergo the most profound transformation through the course of the movie. On the one hand we have Alice who, after appearing well put together whilst drinking a cup of tea, intently listening to a reading of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, eventually reveals herself to be a mere shadow, struggling to mouth the words she wants to say and unable to put together more than a single sentence. On the other was Lydia, the wayward yet headstrong drama student who finds purpose in her life by being the sole carer of Alice, part of which involves reading Angels in America. The final passage she reads from that book is:
…because nothing is lost forever. In this world there is a kind of painful progress, longing for what we have left behind, and dreaming ahead.
The moment following her reading of that passage is what haunts me the most. Lydia asks Alice what the passage meant. Alice, now in the advanced stages of dementia, is unable to piece together a phrase. After a struggling for the words, she is just only just able to say “Love. Yeah. Love.”
Watching movies like Still Alice have made me think about how disease can make us viscerally aware of just how thin the veil that divides the physical and the spiritual actually is. Xavier Symons from the Australian Catholic University has done way more than I have in articulating disease - specifically Alzheimer’s - as a theological problem.
In articulating what he calls a Personalist Theology of Dementia, Symons remind us about how a person is more than mere consciousness and even memory - the very things which get lost in Alzheimer’s. If anything, Symons alerts us to the way in which those with Alzheimer’s retain (if not develop) a “keen spiritual sensibility even when other executive cognitive functions have declined”.
I got a sense of this when watching the end of Still Alice. While she is unable to articulate with any degree of sophistication the nuances of Angels in America, in the space of effectively a couple of words, she is nontheless able to get to the very core of what Kushner sought to explore. To me, that final moment in the movie beautifully embodied, if only partially and with fragility, the passage from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. Amidst all the failures in human relations made evident in the movie’s characters, I found this line in Paul’s letter ringing out in a quiet protest alongside Alice’s “Love. Yeah. Love” breaking through the murmuring that is now her default mode of speech:
And now these three remain: Faith, Hope and Love. And the greatest of these is Love (1 Cor 13:13).
I caught a glimmer of this sensibility in the concluding paragraph of Symon’s article:
Perhaps we are closest to God when our egos are at their lowest ebb and when we are more totally open to the action of grace than ever? At least this much is true: what matters most is not the state of our mind but rather the fundamental orientation of our hearts.
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