Still Alice: May 2004 Summary & Analysis

That May, Alice pays a secret visit to the Mount Auburn Manor Nursing Center to see what kind of care dementia patients receive there. A nurse there asks if she wants to look into it for a parent. Alice tells her yes and they go up to the dementia ward. On the way up, the woman compliments Alice’s butterfly necklace. The necklace had belonged to Sarah, who had only worn it on special occasions, but Alice has recently started wearing it every day. It reminds her of her mother and something she had told her about a butterfly’s “beautiful” life: “just because their lives were short didn’t mean they were tragic.”

In the Alzheimer’s ward, the nurse tells Alice that patients there are allowed to wander around the floor as much as they want and are never tranquilized. Alice notices that the patients there do not talk with one another, and the only sounds there are of eating and one woman singing the same line of a song over and over again. The nurse tells Alice that family members are always welcome, but Alice notices that only one patient has a loved one with them, “no wives, no children or grandchildren, no friends.” Furthermore, the youngest patient there is 70. The cost of keeping a family member there is $100,000 a year, which worries Alice. She leaves quickly, deciding that “[s]he didn’t belong here.”

On a beautiful spring day, “the kind of mythical day that New Englanders dreamed about,” Alice goes to Ben & Jerry’s to get a “triple-scoop Peanut Butter Cup in a cone.” Alice had replaced ice cream with frozen yogurt years ago and is surprised at how much she missed the taste of ice cream. She sits down and thinks about Mount Auburn Manor, how much she never wants to arrive at the point where she needs to live there and considers how frequently she finds herself “making mistakes and struggling to compensate for them.”

While she sits and eats her ice cream, Alice notices the smell of flowers, the sweetness of the ice cream, and the smell of curry from a nearby restaurant. This, however, reminds her that “at some point, she would forget how to eat an ice cream cone” and that, “[a]t some point, there would simply be no point.” Alice wishes she had cancer because that would be something to fight against, there are “no weapons that could slay [Alzheimer’s].”

Alice considers what she wants from the life she has and realizes what she really wants is to hold Anna’s baby, see Lydia act, see Tom fall in love, and have another sabbatical with John. She is surprised by the fact that “[n]owhere in that list was there anything about linguistics, teaching, or Harvard.” Instead, she wants more beautiful spring days and ice cream cones, and “when the burden of her disease [exceeds] the pleasure of that ice cream, she wante[s] to die.”

Alice decides she must make a suicide plan that she can follow through with when her disease gets to be too much. She doesn’t want to ask John or the kids for help, so she pulls out her BlackBerry and creates a quiz that will test her long-term memory. It contains questions about the month, her home and office addresses, Anna’s birthday, and how many kids she has. A daily alarm will remind her to take the quiz, and it includes a note that if she struggles to answer the questions then she should open the “Butterfly” file on her laptop.

Alice runs back to her classroom, afraid that she’s late. She sits in an aisle seat and looks over her syllabus and to-do list. She notices that it’s 10:10 and waits patiently. The students are “becoming restless” and talk about what the delay is about. Alice remembers that if a teacher is 20 minutes late, then the students can leave. She looks at the time (10:21 now), puts her stuff away, and stands up to leave. A couple of girls smile at her and she tells them, “I don’t know about you guys, but I have better things to do” and walks out.