Entertainment

A brave, beautiful biography, richly imagined

December 06, 2009 Edition 1

Maureen Isaacson

There is no way around this sad story. Downhill is the only possible route once the forgetfulness and serious memory loss of Alzheimer's disease has set in.

Many of us fear that its bell may toll for us when we begin to lose our keys and the names of our primary school teachers evade us. Adam Philips in The Forgetting - Understanding Alzheimer's: A Biography of a Disease says that it is "the modern disease that, apart from cancer, haunts our lives".

Yet most of us don't know much about the illness other than it makes clever people stupid and sweet-tempered people angry. How to avoid it? That we do not know, although Patrick Holford, the vitamin peddler, who once suggested the use of high doses of Vitamin C instead of antiretrovirals, recommends we stay away from heavy metals in dental fillings and aluminium pots. Research reveals that high cholesterol is another possible cause.

But even though we may scour this empathetic biography of Kate Jowell, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's at 59, for clues, we are likely to come away unsatisfied.

For Kate Jowell, nee Kathy Bowman, did nothing wrong. She was beautiful, diligent, studious, loving, quiet, she read widely and exercised.

Albie Sachs, Jowell's lover during the 1960s - whom she left to marry Neil Jowell, who had been a 14-year marriage - has written glowingly of his relationship with her.

In Sharon Sorour-Morris's Something on My Mind, Kate Jowell, A Battle with Alzheimer's (Oshun Books), we learn that to Sachs's chagrin, Jowell was no activist but she did her bit for labour relations.

As editor of Fair Lady for two years and later as the first woman to head UCT's Graduate School of Business, there were opportunities. Jowell did not make waves, she rode them, wrote Zelda Gordon-Fish in a profile for Cosmopolitan.

But in the workplace, she fell out with some high-profile people, such as Jane Raphaely at Fair Lady, although they later made up. Raphaely remains a good friend and it was she who introduced Sorour-Morris to Jowell.

Mamphela Ramphele, UCT's Vice Chancellor, had concerns about Jowell's directorship of the university's Business School. Lin Sampson, a journalist who worked for Jowell at Fair Lady, thought her fair.

But life was unfair to Jowell, as she fell prey to what she used to call "Dr Alzheimer's" before her wit was eroded.

When Sorour-Morris met her and embarked on her biography in 2002, Jowell had known for four years that her brain was dying, although so many cases are diagnosed as "possible Alzheimer's" if only because the real proof of it can be gauged only after death, when the brain is exposed by drilling the skull. So writes Sorour-Morris.

The markers for Alzheimer's disease are the plaques and "neurofibrillary tangles" - destructive fibres - that accumulate in the brain and kill the brain's neurons.

It was Alois Alzheimer, a brilliant young German neurologist, who first identified these neurofibrillary tangles, in Frankfurt in 1905.

He observed these, along with the loss of brain cells and senile plaques in a patient known only as Auguste D. Auguste was to become the prototype of the progressive mental disease that strikes patients in the prime of life.

With the progression of her illness, her hapless husband found his pipe in the washing basket, his wife's hairbrush in the oven. She at first found difficulty finding her way home from the shops, later, around the apartment.

Alzheimer's makes you lose your possessions, the threads that hold your life together, even as you hold them in your hand. You forget how to identify everyday objects such as a fork and knife, which is what happened to Jowell.

Sorour-Morris never burdens her readers with her knowledge but she does explain that agonosia, the Greek word for "without knowledge", describes this inability to put together the sensory inputs of touch and smell that may remain intact in the brain of an Alzheimer's sufferer.

She has immersed herself in Jowell's life, engaging, yet drawing aside, to allow us an entree into the world that has remained largely inarticulate; for myself at least. It remains a lump in the throats of the few friends and family members who have lost their own mothers to this disease long before death.

The ambivalence they expressed when their mothers finally died finds an explanation in the harrowing journey Sorour-Morris charts.

In my initial reading of this book, I skimmed over the adjectives describing Jowell's luminosity, her genius and the great heights she would reach, as if to protect myself from the inevitability of the fall.

The writing allows for no such distancing, even as it describes her intense privacy, her reluctance to share her experience with friends, which I read as independence, even a virtual coldness.

But her family, including her daughters Nicola and Justine, suffers the gaping rift and isolation of her illness.

They assist Sorour-Morris in this hugely difficult enterprise, instilling memory where a rich life can no longer be seen on a canvas that is fast becoming void.

Amid the dependence, disintegration and incontinence and the harsh facts from which Sorour-Morris does not recoil, she restores Jowell to her former super-self. Sorour-Morris takes us equally through the slow, muddled breakdown of that self. She has imagined herself into this life, with grace.