Aliceheimer’s. Dana Walrath

      Alice and Dana, camping 1960

      Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass

      Part One of the Aliceheimer’s Project

      Aliceheimer’s found me rather than the other way around. In February of 2008, for the second time in six months, my mother, Alice, was kicked out of her apartment. The reason? Her Alzheimer’s disease. My sister and I looked for alternatives around New York City, her lifelong home. We were hoping to keep her near the relatives to whom she was the closest and near her friends. Instead, she moved hundreds of miles north to live with me and my family in the Vermont woods. Vermont winters are long and cold. She hated snow. I was the daughter who got on her nerves. The feeling was mutual.

      It wasn’t nobility or martyrdom that led me to think this was a good plan. On the surface, I couldn’t bear to see my mother in the lockdown “memory care” unit. Impaired as she was, all her social graces were intact. Alice was as loquacious, intelligent, and charming as ever, and the people in memory care often don’t speak much. That she knew us might ground her. The unfamiliar fields and woods might curb her wandering and her attempts to walk home. Our farmhouse was peaceful. Nature could soothe her.

      Although all of this was true, my real motivations were deep down and hidden. We had unfinished business. I wanted to create a bond with my mother, to redo the past, and to fill the hole inside of me. In the middle of dementia, somehow, my mother wanted to do the same.

      Over the next few years, this is exactly what we did. In the process, all the disparate threads of my life intertwined: creative writing, visual art, and medical anthropology.

      In fact, I was a bitter medical anthropologist when my demented mother moved in with us. Exhausted by years of teaching in a medical school, I was the professor responsible for incorporating culture, diversity, death, dying, and humanism into the required medical curriculum. The last thing I needed was another hard job.

      Anthropologists often enter the world of biomedicine because U.S. medical schools are required to demonstrate that they have trained their students to be “culturally competent.” The anthropological knowledge that facilitates caring for diverse patients is mandated by national accreditation standards. This cultural competency, unlike anthropological training, is meant to be acquired rapidly, according to the axiom that prevails in medical education: “See one. Do one. Teach one.”

      As an anthropologist, I wanted to do more. I wanted students to be able to understand medical systems as cultural systems; to see the social and political determinants of sickness and health; to grasp the social aspects of science; and to perceive the racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and other forms of structural violence embedded in biomedicine. As they crammed scientific facts into their heads, I wanted students to witness their own responses to patient stories, firsthand and raw. Though I was proud of the program I had built, I desperately needed a break from that world. That’s when my mother moved in.

      Anthropologists have a long history of telling stories about the people we study. Our training emphasizes the development of a reflexive muscle so that we can bracket off the ways our personal stories intersect and perhaps even interfere with objective stories. Over time, this reflexivity has allowed anthropologists to consciously blend their personal stories with those of the people they study. For the story of Alice and me, it was a bit the other way around. I was running from anthropology and academia as I started Aliceheimer’s. But somehow the anthropology kept seeping in.

      Most anthropological stories tend to be wholly verbal despite our evolutionary history, in which