The Faces of Alzheimer's

The day after the first anniversary of my sister Maureen Reagan's death, Charlton Heston announced that he had been diagnosed with "symptoms consistent with early stages of Alzheimer's." Sometimes in life, there are odd juxtapositions of events--an interplay of circumstances that makes one pause and wonder what forces are at work. This was one of those times for me. Maureen was so committed to defeating the scourge of Alzheimer's, to getting more funding for research and increasing understanding of the disease that she sometimes delayed her own treatment for the melanoma that eventually killed her.

Maureen would have tirelessly done interviews on Aug. 9; instead, her husband Dennis Revell spoke to the media, as did the actor David Hyde Pierce, who lost both his grandfather and his father to Alzheimer's. My mother released a statement. Maureen's voice had been silenced, but her activism, her determination, were still present.

We learn about diseases through the faces of those who are stricken. Famous faces garner the most attention, obviously. When we think of Alzheimer's, my father's face comes to mind. Or Iris Murdoch's. And now Heston's. When Parkinson's is mentioned, we picture Michael J. Fox or Muhammad Ali.

But there is another way that faces tell the story. You have to lean closer, look carefully into the eyes, study the set of the jaw and the tilt of the head. I recognized more than the famous visage of Heston when I saw his taped announcement. I saw the first shallow waves of a cruel disease lapping at the edges of the person he has always known himself to be. I recognized it because I saw the same look in my father's eyes eight years ago.

In the early stages of Alzheimer's, the eyes have a wariness, a veil of fear. It's as if the person is standing at the edge of a fogbank, knowing that in time it will engulf him and there is no chance of outrunning it. I used to see my father's eyes simultaneously plead and hold firm. It would happen when a sentence broke off because he couldn't remember how to finish it. Or when he would say, "I have this condition--I keep forgetting things." He was on a high wire, balancing on courage, with the dark waters of fear below, and he was using every bit of his strength to cling to that wire.

Slowly--sometimes over months, sometimes over years--the eyes stop pleading. There is a resignation, an acceptance of distance, strangeness, a life far from home. You know the look when you see it, and the only mercy is that fear seems to have subsided.