Dr. Metablog

Away From Her explores the infinitely sorrowful subject of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Fiona Andersson, in her vigorous mid-sixties, has begun to lose her way and to forget names; she stores the frying pan in the refrigerator. She thinks that she’s “beginning to disappear.” Fiona’s plight is worrisome to every human being but it is especially disturbing to people of her own and of Julie Christie’s generation.

Here in our home we still manage to find appropriate places for the cooking utensil, mostly.  Nevertheless, things happen. We set out to purchase six items at the market and come home with just three. We have three errands to perform and we arrive back home with two of the tasks undone. We put the camera in a special secure place and then spend a couple of hours searching for it. Keys and lists and books and tickets regularly evaporate or disintegrate or dematerialize.  Are these forgettings normal or are we en route to something that is too horrible to contemplate?

We exercise, we eat carefully, we gulp those horrid fish oil boluses. Perhaps these defensive procedures have value. Perhaps we’ll be the ones to dodge the Alzheimer bullet.  Perhaps we won’t.

It doesn’t help that we spend many hours a week at the facility where the Aged Parent is incarcerated. We encounter people just like Fiona — or the remnants of them — every day.  They’re hollow shells, slumped in the wheelchair or poking at the boiled-to-mush food. The angry ones, the ones with dead eyes, the ones who moan all day long, “help me.” Better the Seconal and applesauce, the ice floe, or the bullet in the brain than to live in such horrible oblivion.   

In Away From Her, Julie Christie is entirely persuasive as the alzheimered Fiona. But let me ask you, friends of a certain age-cohort, is it really possible that that gray old lady was Julie Christie? Here’s a woman I’ve known for forty-five years, ever since she was Liz for thirty incandescent seconds in Billy Liar — and feckless Billy was too much of a jerkass coward to run away with her. Julie and I have had a long (albeit entirely one-sided) relationship.  I was dazzled by her when she was the voracious Diana Scott in Darling and I feared for her when she was Laura Baxter in Nicholas Roeg’s scary-as-all-hell Don’t Look Now.  She was my favorite Gertrude. But Fiona Andersson is outside any recognizable trajectory;  she’s too raw, too dislocating to my tender sense of the way things ought to be.  No, Julie will always be Liz to me.  I’ve held on to that first image for most of my adult life.

I have no intention of progressing to the "second floor," or to sunset village or to memory lane or to however they euphemize the place that they put the folks with clogged synapses, but, if I should find myself in such a state, let’s hope that it won’t be Fiona but Liz to whom the brain clings.