20: To Be and Not to Be, Personal Identity and Alzheimer's

20 

To Be and Not to Be

Personal Identity and Alzheimer’s 

Thoughts on the movie Still Alice… 

“We are more than the memory of who we are,” I said to Penny on our drive home from the Uptown Theatre and early dinner in Barrie yesterday afternoon, and I knew instantly that this was my entry point into the spiritual musing that the movie Still Alice had inspired; and this morning I called upon my Muse to help me explore the haunting question of personal identity and Alzheimer’s that the movie Still Alice inevitably gives rise to…

I didn’t really want to see Still Alice, starring Julianne Moore who won an Oscar for best actress for her moving performance of the fifty-year old Alice Howland, professor of linguistics at Columbia University afflicted with early-onset Alzheimer’s, because I knew that it would be a tear jerker; but we went anyway, and it proved to be a three-tissue movie.

But it wasn’t so much the emotional impact that Alice had upon me as Alzheimer’s ravages her memory, even though that in itself easily moved me to tears; it was the unbearable irony of her tragic predicament: Alice is an exceptionally bright high-achiever whose personal identity is inextricably linked with her intellect, and when she loses her memory she loses her sense of self-identity and slowly sinks into an abyss of blank-faced dumbness.

This bothered me more than her disease, not because I didn’t empathize with Alice’s rapid deterioration and the effect it had upon her loving family, but because this beautiful and gracious wife and mother of three responsible adult children was hopelessly trapped by the spiritually suffocating scientific paradigm of her condition; and with each passing day and hour and minute her comfortable middle-class world slowly shrank into oblivion.

“You know, sweetheart,” I said to Penny as we drove through Minesing on our way home in Bluewater, Georgian Bay after the heartbreaking movie and simple hot hamburger dinner at Wimpy’s Diner, “what a person believes in makes a difference in how they feel when they’re faced with their own mortality, or a tragic disease like Alice in the movie. Do you remember me telling you about my buddy Michael Ignatieff’s novel Scar Tissue that dealt with this same issue of Alzheimer’s and personal identity?”

“Vaguely,” Penny said. “But you’re going to remind me, aren’t you?”

I was being sarcastic when I called the disgraced former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada Michael Ignatieff my buddy, because I had lost respect for him when he forced a totally unnecessary premature election that decimated the Liberal Party and reduced it to third party status. “Those who can’t, teach,” I responded to the historically catastrophic and personally humiliating defeat (he even lost his own Toronto’s Etobicoke-Lakeshore riding seat) when he resigned as leader of the Official Opposition and ignominiously shrunk away with his bushy academic tail between his legs to teach at the University of Toronto and then back to Harvard’s ivory tower where he had been plucked by the party establishment as the next Trudeau to save Canada from Premier Harper and the Conservative Party.

I respected former professor/journalist/author/broadcaster Michael Ignatieff, whose TV show Ignatieff I watched with avid interest (I distinctly remember his interview with Hemingway’s third wife Martha Gellhorn, whose life with Ernest Hemingway inspired my literary memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway); and I read with fascination his autobiographical novel Scar Tissue that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize because the core of his story was about Alzheimer’s and personal identity, just as the movie Still Alice that was based on the New York Times bestselling novel by neuroscientist Lisa Genova.

I didn’t lose respect for Michael Ignatieff because he aspired to become Prime Minister of Canada, which is a noble if not impossible ambition for even the most astute politician; but because it was an arrogant presumption to think that he could squirm his way to the top position of the Liberal Party and become Prime Minister of Canada without paying his political dues, which was why he was branded by the Conservative Party attack adds during the ill-timed election as “arrogant and elitist,” and it wasn’t by any stretch of imagination that I connected the dots of his massive ego with his novel Scar Tissue whose theme was so intimate and personal that it caused a rift with his family, especially with his brother Andrew who was primary caregiver for his mother and not Michael as he wrote in Scar Tissue.

Michael Ignatieff’s mother fell prey to Alzheimer’s, and he watched her lose her sense of self as her memory faded from week to week until she mercifully passed away in a nursing home; and his autobiographical novel explored the theme of loss of memory and self-identity, because the narrator of Scar Tissue is a philosophy professor not unlike the author who is haunted by his fear of inheriting his mother’s Alzheimer’s, and what better way for the professor turned politician, who when campaigning for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada cleverly called himself “neither atheist nor believer,” to immortalize his name than to become Prime Minster of Canada just in case Alzheimer’s erased his memory? What better confirmation could one have to validate their insecure egoic need to be?

I have no doubt that in his mind the Harvard professor’s motives for entering Canadian politics were pure and altruistic (despite the fact that he lived outside Canada for thirty years, he professed to a philosophy of engagement to justify his commitment to the Liberal Party), but novels based on one’s personal life have a tendency to reveal much more than the author realizes, as many writers have learned after a critical study of their work; and Michael Ignatieff’s intensely personal and poignant novel Scar Tissue reflected the tremulous shadow side of the author’s scholarly trained ego that goes straight to the issue of consciousness and individual identity: is our reflective self-consciousness an epiphenomenon of our biology, which disappears when our physical body dies; or does our reflective self co-exist with our physical body and continues to exist non-biologically after our body dies?

This is the core issue of Scar Tissue that Michael Ignatieff tried to come to terms with creatively through narrative inquiry, and it is the same implicit issue of the movie Still Alice that is left hanging in the air as Alice fades away into herself, and it also happens to be the issue that I devoted my whole life to resolving and writing about in my novels, essays, and memoirs and which is the working premise of today’s spiritual musing. Having said this, I can now proceed to the heart of the issue of being and not being who we are… 

Creatively speaking, Alzheimer’s is like a magnifying glass that focusses our attention on the individual self; because as one loses one’s memory with the ravages of this disease, one’s self-identity disappears. But where does it go? That’s the heart of the issue.

Science would have us believe that when we die, the matrix of consciousness that made up our individual self-identity dies with us; or, generously speaking, science may allow the possibility that like energy which can neither be created nor destroyed but simply changes form, the matrix of our reflective self-consciousness may simply go back into the cosmic stream of life, which is precisely what the Buddhist philosophy contends.

Michael Ignatieff’s inquiry into the issue of Alzheimer’s and self-identity appears to hold this point of view also. Bringing his narrative to closure, the author/narrator says: "But I know that there is a life beyond this death, a time beyond this time. I know that at the very last moment, when everything I ever knew has been effaced from my mind, when pure vacancy has taken possession of me, then light of the purest whiteness will stream in through my eyes into the radiant and empty plain of my mind." But this is the non-self of the Buddhist philosophy; not the individuated consciousness of our autonomous self that pre-exists our mortal physical body and continues to exist when our body dies.

I’ve already explored this issue in my book Stupidity Is Not a Gift of God, in my essay “On the Evolutionary Impulse to Individuate: A Response to the Spiritual Path of Evolutionary Enlightenment,” so I need not go into detail here; suffice to say that in my quest for resolution to the issue of the self, I came to the conclusion that we are all born with a spark of divine consciousness that evolves through life into an individual and autonomous self; and the self evolves naturally through the karmic process of being and becoming. In effect, to be, we have to become; and we become who we are according to how we live our life. That’s the central mystery of the human condition, and the answer to riddle of the self that I have explored in the memoir of my quest for my true self, The Pearl of Great Price.

Given my personal perspective, then; I see the matrix of consciousness that we call our reflective self not as a byproduct (epiphenomenon) of the brain (our neurology), but as an autonomous self that exists independently of our body; but what other proof do we have?

In the movie Still Alice, Alice Howland loses her self-identity as her memory is erased by early-onset Alzheimer’s; but was her self-identity a byproduct of her neurological system which disappears into oblivion when that part of her brain is ravaged by her disease, or does it recede elsewhere where it cannot be seen? In other words, is Alice still Alice despite the loss of her memory of who she is? Would Alice still be Alice if she lost a leg, an arm, a breast, or a vital organ that had to be replaced, like her heart?

Many heart transplant patients have reported the strange phenomenon of taking on personality traits of their donors, like Jane Seymour did in the movie Heart of a Stranger that was inspired by the true story of Claire Sylvia’s heart transplant; but that’s a separate musing that I hope to write one day. The point of today’s spiritual musing is this: is our self-identity limited to our memory alone, or does it pervade throughout the cells of our entire body as pioneer researcher in cellular consciousness Dr. Graham Farrant and Dr. Paul Pearlsall (The Heart’s Code) have discovered, and even beyond cellular memory in non-biological form after our body dies? And if so, what proof do we have besides my own conviction?

In October, 2012 Dr. Eben Alexander, a practicing neurosurgeon for twenty-five years who was scientifically convinced that self-identity was an epiphenomenon of the brain, had a unique if not providential medical experience that changed his entire scientific perspective on consciousness and made him a believer in the independent existence of our individual and autonomous self, and he wrote a book on the experience that initiated him into the divine mystery of the self. The book is called Proof of Heaven, A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife; and it was on the New York Times bestseller list for 97 weeks. 

“On November 10, 2008,” he writes, “I was struck by a rare illness and thrown into a coma for seven days. During that time, my entire neocortex—the outer surface of the brain, the part that makes us human—was shut down. Inoperative. In essence, absent.”

Dr. Alexander believed that “the brain is a machine that produces consciousness,” and when “the machine breaks down, consciousness stops.” But the rare illness that he contracted (which proved to be a rare virus) shut his brain down and sent him into a seven-day coma that should have shut his consciousness down according to his scientific paradigm, but Dr. Alexander instead experienced himself outside his body in what Dr. Raymond Moody (Life After Life) described as the most astounding near-death experiences that he had studied in more than four decades of researching this incredible phenomenon.

In the Prologue to Proof of Heaven, former non-believer Dr. Alexander contritely writes: “My experience showed me that the death of the body and the brain are not the end of consciousness, that human experience continues beyond the grave. More important, it continues under the gaze of God who loves and cares about each one of us and about where the universe itself and all the beings within it are ultimately going.” Which means, quite simply, that Alice was still Alice, despite her loss of memory!

───