麻豆社

Good morning. Every third minute someone in the UK begins living with dementia. I've been pondering that stark statistic this week, after seeing the stage version of Still Alice. Lisa Genova's novel, on which the play is based, is a study of a fifty-year-old university professor, Alison Howland, who has early-onset dementia. Four years ago Julieanne Moore received an Oscar for best actress in the film version. Like many others, Alice is aware of what's happening to her in the first stages of her illness. While still working as an academic, she has moments when she cannot find her way around her house or goes to work in her dressing gown. Realising what's going on Alice simply says "I miss myself". It's a reminder of how much our identity is bound up with memory. Alice remembers enough to know what she's losing. We don't think brushing our teeth is much of a feat of memory at all. But in this context it is. So too is our ability to recognise the faces of the people we know.

Some research from the University of York published this week illustrated just how large is the capacity of the average human memory for facial recognition. My recall of names and faces comes more slowly as my years advance, so I was intrigued to learn that most of us are able to register and recall 5,000 people. For much of human history that's more people than anyone would meet in a lifetime.

It can be crushing when someone you thought knew you well doesn't recognise you. Your self-worth takes a dent. If someone's truly observant they may see that written on your face. Our faces disclose much more than our appearance.

Perhaps it's no surprise then that there's rather a lot in the Bible about seeking the face of the Lord, all part of a search for God in the midst of life. In Matthew's Gospel we are told he's to be seen and recognised in the poor, the hungry, the stranger and the prisoner. The list isn't exhaustive and I would want to add those suffering from dementia to it, desperately hard though it is to bear seeing someone with so much taken away. In the stage version of Still Alice, the action begins in a cluttered family home. As one scene follows another everything is removed until only two canvas chairs remain for Alice and her husband. While we still see in her the person she was and is, she's reached the stage of not being able to recognise others, truly to see them. And that's perhaps the biggest deprivation of all.

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