Aliceheimer’s. Dana Walrath

This social process depends on sharing stories with others, on letting our collective memories meet. By meeting through story, we make peace and move on even if we are sick, hurt, or dying.

      I encourage you to read the book in several ways. Page through to feel the storyline as it exists in the drawings on their own; read it from cover to cover, feeling the long narrative carried in the text that was inspired by the images and written over several years; and finally, when your attention is short, as it is for anyone with memory challenges or simply pressed for time, leaf through the book to any page and take in a single vignette along with the image that set that story into motion.

      Pick up your pens. Tell your stories. And remember that showing the faces, the lived experience, and the daily reality of those with Alzheimer’s and other altered, different states removes the stigma and restores their humanity. Find comfort with alternate realities. Develop a fondness for ritual and magic. Embrace a critical stance toward authority. Understand that medical systems are cultural systems and that rules are both arbitrary and central to social interaction. Know that birth and death are not just biological happenings. Be an anthropologist to your own life.

      Graphic medicine gives us ways to see the world through the eyes of others. We can better understand those who are hurting, feel their stories, and redraw and renegotiate those social boundaries. Most of all, it gives us a way to heal and to fly over the world as Alice does.

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*For more on this, see Nancy Scheper-Hughes and M. Margaret Lock, “The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Medical Anthropology,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1, no. 1 (March 1987): 6–41.

      Alice

      For her seventy-sixth birthday, my mother, Alice, wanted spaghetti and meatballs and vanilla cake with chocolate icing. We gave her a small black kitten with white spots. When she asked, “So, how old am I?” she gave us a new theme song for the year.

      “Seventy-six trombones? When did that happen?”

      Seventy-six trombones led the big parade. Alice remembers all the songs from The Music Man and countless others from her youth. The present is more elusive. These days she doesn’t remember that she has Alzheimer’s. But she used to. And she always sings.

      One May morning, she stood by my dining room windows, looking out over the rolling fields, and sang this bit from Babes in Arms:

       It seems we stood and talked like this before

       We looked at each other in the same way then,

       But I can’t remember where or when.

       The clothes you’re wearing are the clothes you wore.

       The smile you are smiling you were smiling then,

       But I can’t remember where or when.

      She stopped and she smiled and said, “That should be the Alzheimer’s theme song.”

      Aliceheimer’s.