Sliding into the Mental Fog

My wife has a very good friend with whom she has gone on walks on these country roads, off and on, for years.   Lately that lady friend was diagnosed with what I'm calling "pre-Alzheimers."   The condition has a fancier name but at the moment I can't recall it.   

As with so much else that all along has been waiting alongside  this far end of the road of my life, with no way to know which things will hit and which will not, I've been paying a lot of attention to Alzheimer's and what's involved -- that mental fog into which some people gradually slide,  never to return.   It is one of many terrors that I would very much like to avoid, if such a thing is possible, but  a magic suit of armor or a comfortable gas mask to guard against that particular threat has not yet been invented.  And this lady is nearly 20 years younger than me.

I keep wondering if she knows, and whether in general the victims are told from the beginning.  And if they are told, do they eventually forget and so in the later stages can't realize what is happening to them?

 In an otherwise heavily unengaging 2008 movie called "The Family that Preys," the character played by Kathy Bates, the matriarch of a weatlthy family, reveals that she has been diagnosed with the same pre-Alz. She enlists her best friend, played by Alfre Woodard, to help her with her memory lapses, but then, at the movie's conclusion,  its makers resorted to the old standby for mediocrity in film plotting  by having her ingest a whole medicine cabinet of pills and so taking herself out of here well ahead of time.

My wife's walking buddy is in another bag altogether, and she strikes me as being as happy as a bug in a rug.  The only differences in her behavior from her former subtle and super-cool state of mind that we've been able to note is that she will rarely bring up subjects for conversation -- but she has an extremely talkative husband to cover that -- and that when she does speak, her statements  are curiously like those of a deacon in a Baptist church who is highly appreciative of everything the preacher says and every song that the choir garbles -- and,  above all, there is her pet  comment, repeated an average of 10 times per walk. that "It is so peaceful and quiet here!"

And so it looks as if my wife is now playing Alfre Woodward to B's Kathy Bates, and when B. and her mate come over here for that brisk. healthy walk of the two ladies a mile and a half down to the river bridge and  back, her husband spends the time here at the house in a game of chess against me.

That takes other things into other odd  mental states.   But that's another story.