In the UK's Daily Telegraph (paywall) the celebrated Catholic pianist/composer Stephen Hough writes movingly about a condition which causes so much fear among so many. Me, for instance. All too often these days I find myself wondering, "Um, what did I want in here? Maybe it'll come back to me if I go out and come in again...' Just daft, maybe (so no change there?) but... God knows what's coming to me as I advance into decrepitude..
Here's a taste of Hough's piece:
Fr O'Leary recently wrote a beautiful, provocative, moving mediation on Alzheimer's disease called 'Silent grace of forgetting'. All of us face the possibility of dementia in varying degrees, either in our own future lives or in the lives of those we love. Its threat is to suck out the personality of the person, leaving behind an empty husk or, worse, a familiar body filled with unfamiliar malevolence – a strange enemy where a dear friend had stood. It's disturbing when it's not damned terrifying.
In his article Fr O'Leary dares to explore a possible spirituality behind this dreadful disease in the need for "care-filled reverence, [for us to be] the memory for the person, to hold the fragments of a life together".
He points out that "it is not our minds alone which make us human", and he quotes Thomas Merton who wrote of "the secret beauty of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-awareness can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes".If you want to read it all, there is a PDF here. Left click to view it, right click to save it.
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