Mrigaanka Rajagopalan
Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is explored a lot in mainstream media from The Notebook to Still Alice. One such movie that does so is a 2006 Canadian independent film called Away from Her directed by Sarah Polly and starring Julie Christie and Gordon Pinset (Polly, 2006). A story about a couple’s trials and tribulations when one of them is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. The story revolves around the couple Fiona and Grant Anderson who have been married for 44 years. The onset of Fiona’s Alzheimer's forces them to live apart as she decides to live in a nursing home when her conditions worsen. The movie not only shows the effect of Alzheimer's on the patient but also on their loved ones.
Alzheimer's disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that causes brain cells to die and the brain to shrink (atrophy). AD is the most prevalent form of dementia, which is defined as a progressive deterioration in cognitive, behavioral, and social abilities that impairs a person's capacity to operate independently (Hooley et al., 2020). This disorder is accompanied by and is not limited to, loss of memory, speech and motor impairment, etc. The rate of prevalence of AD is estimated to double about every five years after the age of forty. While less than one percent of the people between sixty to sixty-four years have this disorder, up to forty percent of the people above eighty years have it (pp 519). One of these people is Fiona Anderson, a 62-year-old woman, who got diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. One of the earlier signs of AD shown in the movie was the gradual loss of her memory from her absent-mindedly keeping the pan in the freezer to losing her way home. This gradually progresses to her forgetting her husband.
People associate AD with only loss of memory, and though it is a big part of it, that is not all that the disorder entails. The movie does a good job of portraying some of the other symptoms of AD. One such symptom is that of false memories. Patients with Alzheimer's Disease (AD) not only have a loss of memory, but they are also prone to distorting their memories, such as having full and vivid recollections of episodic events they have never experienced (i.e., false memories) (Haj et al., 2020). As Fiona’s AD progresses she has distorted memories. She believed the house where she and Grant used to live to be her grandparents’ house. She also believed to have met her fellow resident in Meadowlake, named Aubrey, in the past which leads her to get herself romantically involved with him. She also starts to have a skewed sense of time, asking Grant whether they moved into their house a year or two years ago, when they had been living in the house for the past twenty years.
There are scenes in the movie where Fiona is struggling with language. AD can cause a decline in the semantic and pragmatic levels of language processing which leads to language impairment (Ferris & Farlow, 2013). Language content, including words and their meaning, is involved in semantic processing. Deficits of which can cause difficulty with word searching, naming, and word understanding. It can also involve semantic paraphasia (using the wrong words), empty speech, inventing words, and a lack of verbal fluency (Ferris & Farlow, 2013). We can see her struggling to read the wine bottle at a dinner party at the beginning of the movie. Towards the end of the movie she tells Grant “You could have just driven away… driven away without a care in the world and forsook me…forsooken me, forsaken” (Polly, 2006). Thus, showing the slow progression of AD.
Away from her not only shows the issues that patients with AD face but also shows what their caregivers or spouses go through. Grant’s journey from denial of her disorder to his acceptance is beautifully captured. Grant is used as a symbol for the mental toll and the anxiety that one has watching someone they love to forget them and their shared memories. It shows the lengths they can go through, however, romanticized in this movie, to make their lives easier. Grant though unhappy with the fact that Fiona had forgotten about her marriage to him and had developed feelings for Aubrey tries to bring him back to Meadowlake after his wife, Marian takes him back home.
It also shows the other side of the effect on caregivers, pushing them to pursue other people, either romantically or platonically. The stress of taking care of Aubrey, managing the cost of his treatment, while also not having the love and the intimacy of her spouse, led Marian to seek a new relationship with Grant. The stress of his wife not remembering him and seeing her worsen led him to reciprocate.
The movie portrays Fiona in her early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease, slowly progressing and worsening. However, the focus of the film is how Grant copes with the effect of AD on their relationship, thus sidelining her coping with the disorder in the process. Though the movie does a great job of showing the effect of a debilitating disorder on the people they care about, it does a superficial job of showing the mental toll it takes on the person going through the disorder.
References
Ferris, S. H., & Farlow, M. (2013). Language impairment in Alzheimer’s disease and benefits of acetylcholinesterase inhibitors. Clinical Interventions in Aging, 8. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3739421/pdf/cia-8-1007.pdf
Haj, M. E., Colombel, F., Kapogiannis, D., & Gallouj, K. (2020). False Memories in Alzheimer's Disease. Hindawi.
Hooley, J. M., Nock, M., & Butcher, J. N. (2020). Abnormal Psychology, Global Edition. PEARSON ACADEMIC.
Polly, S. (Director). (2006). Away From Her [Film]. Capri Releasing.
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