Alzheimer's, Socrates and Unemployment

This has been a favorite quote of mine for a while now:

“For I go around doing nothing but persuading both young and old among you not to care for your body or your wealth in preference to or as strongly as for the best possible state of your soul.”

-Socrates

I studied a lot of philosophy in college and winded up reading a lot of what this guy said, (though it's usually attributed to Plato, his student).

I've, luckily, landed a job that will start in 6 days, but during my "funemployment" (it's fun because I know there'll be an eventual end to this idleness) I've been watching hours of TED talks. 

As much as the next guy, I'm a sucker for the captivating/alarming/suprising headline, so today I watched one entitled "How I'm Preparing to Get Alzheimer's."

Now, these talks are usually grounded in solutions to issues that haunt us, or revelations that should change our thinking about a given topic. I had never come across one which accepted the subject as unsolvable, inevitable and something to cope with. And the speaker - Alanna Shaikh- is not some ordinary, idle layman - she's a global development expert working on the world's toughest global health problems. It was like watching a BP engineer showing Gulf of Mexico birds how to swim in oily waters.

My mother once took care of a man who has Alzhiemer's. Eventually, he came to a point where he needed advanced nursing care. But, when asked, she returned last weekend to give him a haircut and I accompanied her. In the time since they'd last seen each other (April), the man -a former renowned doctor- had no recollection of who my mother was. She told me that he once joked with her and recounted difficult times in his life with her. After our visit she lamented that he was now far from the man she knew just last spring. It was incredibly scary to hear how rapidly the disease worked to break him down. What a lonely and confusing world it must be for him.

What Shaikh, who is convinced she will face the hereditary disease like her father before her, eventually concludes is striking.
Around 5:13 she says the following: 

"My dad was kind and loving before he had Alzheimer's and he's kind and loving now. I've seen him lose his intellect, his sense of humor, his language skills, but i've also seen this: he loves me, he loves my sons, he loves my brothers and my mom and his caregivers. And that love makes us want to be around him, even now, even when it is so hard.

When you take away everything he has learned in this world, his naked heart still shines.

I was never as kind as my dad and I was never as loving. What I need now is to learn to be like that. I need a heart so pure that if it's stripped down by dementia it will survive."

As it relates to the Socrates quote, Alzheimer's will take away your body, and money will no longer be a conscious concern. But like Shaikh's father, what she says will endure is a fundamental piece of you that will make it easier for loved ones to relate to when the rest of "you" is gone - a soul, if you will. That is the piece, Shaikh bravely admitted she felt was deficient in her own make-up and what she said she will work on until the day comes when the "monster" of the disesase (possibly)/inevitably knocks at her door.