Someone who sees writing on the walls. So, like a prophet?

Or a woman with Alzheimer’s?

My grandmother?

Yeah, that’s more like it. I was sitting with my grandmother yesterday while my grandfather spent the day in the hospital, and, needless to say, she was beside herself with anxiety and worry. After about 15 minutes of us sitting in the family room, she got up from the armchair in the corner, walked slowly to the wall, and looked at it with the intensity of an avid scholar, her finger tracing an invisible line.

“Whatcha doing?” I asked.

“I’m reading,” she replied.

“What are you reading?” I asked, out of blatant curiosity.

“It says Mort isn’t doing well. The news isn’t good.”

She said this sincerely, without a trace of doubt. There was no doubt, in her mind, that the wall had a message on it for her, a message about my granddad. And later, the peach she was supposed to be eating—that said something on it, too, and she turned it round and round in her hands trying to decipher the words on it.

What are you seeing? What goes on in your mind?

The questions I wonder, that I’ll never have the answer to.

What is it, exactly, that Alzheimer’s patients see? What is it that they think? I’ve heard of people with Alzheimer’s being confused, and lost, and wandering off, even becoming violent and totally unlike themselves. But the hallucinations, the sense I get that my grandmother truly sees things that I cannot, things that aren’t there, that’s something new.

But it’s just something that’s new to me, because of course people with Alzheimer’s have undergone this curious phenomenon for as long as the disease has existed. Take this artist, William Utermohlen, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1995 and decided to draw an annual self-portrait in the subsequent years after his diagnosis.

An absolutely poignant reminder of how severely Alzheimer's ravages the brain....the difference between the self-portrait done in 1967, before the Alzheimer’s, and the one done in 1996, just one year after the diagnosis, is shocking. The portraits look abstract at first, as though Utermohlen was experimenting with Van Gogh-esque techniques, and yet we know that it was merely a result of the disease his brain was succumbing to. But the last picture, look at that one. How old would you say the person who did that picture was? Maybe 5 or 6? I stare at that last picture and it captivates me. The utter deterioration of spatial sense, of optical processing, would be fascinating if it weren’t so damn sad.

Are these paintings of his face actually what Utermohlen saw when he looked in the mirror, or was he simply unable to convey what he saw on paper? After having seen my grandmom’s utter conviction of the writing on the wall, or on a piece of fruit, I’m inclined to think the former.

Take a brain, a healthy, normal brain. Then shrink it, literally shrink the cortex, and tangle together the many protein strands that help structure the brain cells, and magnify the fluid filled brain cavities, and make sure to stucco plaque in between the nerve cells, and you’ll have a brain with Alzheimer’s.

Forget forming new memories, or being able to learn new things, or even read or write—simply walking and eating are a struggle.

Terrifying, bizarre, sad, interesting—just a few of the words I’d choose to describe Alzheimer’s, although it would be preferable to take an interest in the disease as a researcher rather than as a granddaughter.