I wrote it a week ago Beatriz Perez in a report, in these same pages, about the early alzheimer: “There is, perhaps, something harder than suffering it: being aware of one’s own disease.” This no man’s land is a cliff above the calm beach that lies in the background. It is the moment of restless conscience before the amorphous serenity of the end. Pérez spoke of those moments in the life of someone who knows an ineluctable future against which there are still so few weapons in the arsenal. He spoke of this knowledge of irreversible processes, of the slow arrival of the void, of the path that leads to the realm of “deep darkness & rdquor ;.” That’s how I defined it Iris Murdockin one of his novels, before falling victim to the disease: “I had the terrible feeling that if I didn’t manage to catch him at that moment, he would end up disappearing forever, plunged into deep darkness & rdquor ;.
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The teacher John Bayley, Murdoch’s husband, wrote a book, ‘Elegy for Iris’, which delicately reflected his steps towards oblivion and, at the same time, was a diary that exhibited cruel details, such as that Murdoch ended up looking (and that was the distracted) the Teletubbies on TV. They say that jonathan swift, the one from Gulliver’s Travels, also suffered from a similar dementia. Speaking of the Struldbrughs tribe, he writes that by the time they reach 90 years of age “they forget the names of things and people, even the closest ones, and they don’t get excited about what they read because just after reading a line they already they have forgotten & rdquor ;.
What are the mechanisms that we set in motion when we are informed that everything that was happening to us (disorientation, memory loss, lack of words, confusion in the face of everyday life: the shoelaces that we no longer know how to are tied!) materializes in a so bleak diagnosis? In addition, thanks to the advances of medical institutions such as the Barcelona Beta Brain Research Center of the Pasqual Maragall Foundation, we are glimpsing the possibility that biomarkers can predict the disease years before it develops. How to face a dagger like this on the chest, a sentence that awaits at the end of the corridor? I don’t know. Perhaps only words like the ones Bayley wrote at the end of his book remain: “Every day we are physically closer. Iris doesn’t navigate in the dark; the journey is over and with the dark accompaniment of alzheimer’s, she has arrived at a place, I don’t know where. Me too.”