Dementia and Alzheimer's and Nuns

I remember that Time article about nuns and Alzheimer's published in 2001. Clearly. Unfortunately, it is behind a paywall now so I can't access but if you're interested and a subscriber you can go ahead and do so. Nuns had not only generously co-operated with studies on these brain diseases but also donated their bodies, postmortem, to science in selfless efforts to assist further research. I remember the autopsies showed that even though advanced degradation of brain cells due to Alzheimer's had occurred in these nuns, other segments of their brains had taken over complex functions like needlework and crossword puzzles thus keeping the Alzheimer's unnoticed by those around them. The personalities of the nuns had much to do with their abilities in later years (90+). Many of them had kept journals from their teenage years exhibiting a positivism about life and a thirst for learning.

I did find a similar article in the New York Times but it's not as detailed as the Time essay - and I am relying on - ahem! - my memory about the original article.

Excerpt:

At 93, Sister Nicolette Welter still reads avidly, recently finishing a biography of Bishop James Patrick Shannon. She knits, crochets, plays rousing card games and, until a recent fall, was walking several miles a day with no cane or walker.

I was driven to write this by a visit to an old friend yesterday who is in a third level care home. She is 93 and until the last year or so was taking care of herself in her own home. Reading and playing complex card games and knitting sweaters for her pensioner sons. Then one of her sons died. And the family hadn't told her he was dying. And this shoved her over the edge into mental disarray which has remained.

My grandmother, then in her seventies, was similarly afflicted when my mother died. Within a short period she retreated to an alternative world where Mum was still with us and Granny, our darling granny, never surfaced again.

My aunt, a bridge playing, golfing entrepreneur in her nineties, vanished into her own bottomless dark hole when her youngest child died at 49.

As to my friend, she is like a skeleton in a wheelchair, her caustic P&V with which we were all familiar has vanished, replaced by this gaunt shell with haunted eyes and no memory of us, her former familiars, but a clear memory of her dead son visiting her yesterday.

An unknown percentage of these "long goodbye" diseases is down to circumstances surely? None of those nuns lost a child and I wonder if this has a huge bearing on our emotional and mental abilities in our later years. As I have witnessed, heartbreakingly, first hand.

Sister Margaret Anne

Photo taken yesterday whilst out and about locally.

She was a plain woman. Some might say ugly. A whiskered and misaligned face which drooped in chronic disappointment at life and those participating in it. Nature compensated her with beautiful hands, large, well formed and competent, the hands of a sculptor, and naturally blonde hair which she wore in a fluffy halo around her head. An incongruous appearance.

At the age of thirty-six, when her widowed mother died, she left her nursing order of Catholic sisters and reclaimed her birth name of Grace. She wrote to a man who had an advertisement in the lonely hearts section of the Catholic Register. Serious replies only, he said. Loyal, he said. Looks not important, he said.

How was she to know when he drove all the way from rural Saskatchewan to Brampton, Ontario to meet her and marry her within the month that he was a drunk and would beat her every Saturday afternoon and make her perform disgusting things in bed? She a thirty-six year old virgin and twenty years in a convent her only life experience?

She desperately wanted a child so suffered the daily indignities of living with such a man. And of course there were the vows of holy matrimony, and the leaving of the convent to consider. Pride? Yes, she swallowed it.

Her longed for child resulted in a great hulking daughter with the bright red hair of her father who outweighed her own mother by her tenth birthday. This was the year Grace left her husband and had a restraining order placed on him by the courts. Her divorce and subsequent annulment on the grounds of unrepentant abuse and chronic alcoholism followed swiftly.

Her daughter moved out when she was barely sixteen. Searching, Grace found her living in a commune on Bathurst Street in Toronto, high on drugs and alcohol. Grace refused to speculate on the type of income that would support such a lifestyle and thought it best, after pleading with her, to leave her there. It had been a challenge to love such a child, a child who seemed like her father reincarnated in female form.

Grace drifted backwards, drawn more and more to the life that had been so safe and uncomplicated. She retook her vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and asked for, and was given, work in the wards of the terminally ill.

She would often say to me that she didn't know what that long intermission was about as all she was taught when she was out in the real world was how to hate the man who had abused her and the ungrateful daughter who was his seed through and through.

And I'd say - Hate? Is hate all you learned? Can't you let it go?

And she'd shake her head vehemently and her crooked mouth would settle into a grim straight line and she'd hiss:

You don't understand at all, do you? Hate is all I have left.

I’m not Scared of Dyin’……

I'm not scared of dying and I don't really care
If it's peace you find in dying, well then, let the time be near
If it's peace you find in dying, well then dying time is near
Just bundle up my coffin, 'cause it's cold way down there
I hear that it's cold way down there, yeah crazy cold, way down there
And when I die, and when I'm gone
There'll be, one child born
In this world to carry on, to carry on

My troubles are many there as deep as a well
I can swear there ain't no heaven but I pray there ain't no hell
Swear there ain't no heaven and I'll pray there ain't no hell
But I'll never know by livin' only my dyin' will tell
Yes only my dyin' will tell, oh yeah, only my dyin' will tell

And when I die, and when I'm gone
There'll be, one child born
In this world to carry on, to carry on…. (Song by Laura Nyro (thanks Rhea!) Performed by Blood Sweat & Tears)

I was riveted on this NYT article. These nuns have surely found a way to die in peace, at home, without the intervention of extraordinary measures to keep them alive while amongst life long friends.

The severe ravages and mental deterioration due to Alzheimers and other elder-type diseases have not affected these nuns and priests. Many are engaged with creative and intellectual pursuits. Most have been well-educated with a rich inner life and have friendships in community going back seventy years in some cases.

I was reminded of the Time article of many years ago – 2001 – (I just found it, thank you Google! )


The nuns volunteered to take part in what has now become known as the ‘Nun Study’ where tests are regularly conducted and assessments of mental agility and ability are tracked.


Take this:

One is Sister Esther Boor, who at 106 speeds through the labyrinth of halls with a royal blue walker, glazes ceramic nativity scenes for the gift shop and pedals an exercise bike every day, her black veil flapping, an orange towel draped over her legs for modesty.
"Sometimes I feel like I'm 150, but I just made up my mind I'm not going to give up," said Sister Esther, who gives her exercise therapists yellow notes with phrases from books she reads. "Think no evil, do no evil, hear no evil," she wrote recently, "and you will never write a best-selling novel."

The bottom line, I believe, is living with passion and curiosity. Daily reading, writing, knitting, walking, etc., seem to be the common element in a positive quality of life extension as we age. And community.

And: oh yes, compassion, kindness and patience with others. I really need to work on those.

And speaking of heaven.....