Two Friends

A recent BBC program on Alzheimer's Disease called to mind two good friends whom the disease has killed within the past ten years. Both were in their early 70's when they were diagnosed with the illness, and both perished within five or six years after the diagnosis.

The first to die was a colleague of mine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an enormously learned man, a specialist in Semitic languages, and the author of many scholarly publications. I often turned to him for help and not always for academic purposes, as when I asked him to translate for me the Amharic inscriptions on our Ethiopian paintings. He was a brilliant conversationalist, a sparkling Roman candle of a talker, and an incomparable spinner of anecdotes and jokes. To this day I relate some of his stories, although never with the same brio or effect.

He was lamentably diminished the last time I saw him, almost silent, when he and his wife came to dinner at our home in Jerusalem. Within a year or two he moved into a facility that could give him the care that had become increasingly difficult to provide for him at home. By that time, he recognized few people other than members of his immediate family. I could never bring myself to visit him there, a failing for which I continue to criticize myself. But I continue to think of him. Even today, when I'm stumped by a question, I often think sadly that he would have known the answer.

The second friend to die was a children's- book writer and a witty and imaginative publishing publicist (to promote the sale of a book, one of a series, in which the heroine finally marries, she sent out engraved invitations for a book party at a fancy hotel, complete with wedding cake), but she's best known for a memoir that's sold almost one million copies and has been translated into numerous languages.

She was keenly interested in Israel, which could do no wrong, as far as she was concerned, in contrast to her generally liberal views about American political matters. She was to the right of Attila the Hun, her husband used to say, in her positions regarding Israel, but this was consistent with her fierce loyalty towards those she loved. Definite in her opinions, she expressed them forcibly, but she wisely refused to read drafts of her friends' books, not wanting, she said, her own work to be influenced by them. This always struck me as an excuse. It would have been painful for her to give a negative opinion, were it justified, and it would have been equally painful for her to dissemble. But she was endlessly encouraging to her friends during their own struggles with their work.

There was something clearly wrong with her the last time we saw her in Jerusalem, which she often visited during the time we lived there. At a reception, she looked lost, strangely quiet and melancholy, not totally present. As her disease progressed, she required a full-time caregiver at home. The last time we saw her, at her home in New York, the nervousness and anxiety which had never been far distant from her seemed to have gone, replaced by a sunny calmness. Yet shards of her personality caught the light, creating for a moment, now and then, the illusion that she was unchanged.

If there were any justice in the world, such brilliant friends as these would have been spared. But Alzheimer's Disease in indiscriminate, and as I approach my eighties, I worry about my own susceptibility as well as that of my wife, my brother and sister, and their spouses. About half of all those older than 85 are diagnosed with the disease, an incidence about 14 times as high as among those who are 65-69. But as I often say, we tend to worry about the wrong things. I hope that this is one of them.