STILL ALICE January 16 Most of you know my wife of more than four decades, the brilliant, loving, wise adventurer, professor and mother Cristina Kessler Noble - Tina. Her journey with Alzheimers began at age 47. Shes now 63 and in Hospice care with us. *Still Alice* is a book I couldnt quite bear to read all the way to its end, but it mirrors Tinas life in remarkable ways. This movie feels like an attempt at comprehending an incomprehensible disease. Im half-terrified of seeing it, but I will. I hope youll see it too. PIE Her speech is so tangled now, so many nouns departed, so many fractured silences, that her fingers flutter like flutter like flutter like . . . birds, she would say, if they had not flown. Today, after long dreamless sleep at the height of the day, mouth agape and drying, she struggles from the bed in despair, everything flown away, words and more than words, so that caresses and loving prattle have no power to lift calamity. She has grown years older than her years, as if every night she rises from bed and wanders ahead of us through time. She lives at a distance, smaller and smaller. What is easiest to see now is what is missing -- the doors that cannot be opened, the shirt that cannot be put on, the hesitant step. But while she slept we have made a pie, daughter and I, a sunny pie of nectarines and raspberries, a pie of exquisite beauty and summer love, a pie we are sure will make her happy. It is no use. She will not be enticed to the kitchen, where the pies cinnamon-gold crust and fragrant steam can work their magic. We cajole. We invite. We tug her kitchenward. Her feet remain planted in the middle of the living room, head bowed, face averted. Pie, we exclaim, a wonderful pie! And then she finds a way to teach us, a way to keep us from forgetting who she is. Her thin arms reach out to encircle us, pull us close. She looks up. With great effort she searches our eyes, tightening the embrace. She is about to speak. People, she says, with perfect clarity. Not pie. And we stand together within this smallest of all possible circles, rescued, reminded, nearly ready, even, for pie, in the midst of this day, this ordinary day, we struggle to find the grace for. --Bill Noble, 2010
Posted on: Wed, 07 Jan 2015 01:03:07 +0000
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