This article is reproduced from PhoenixWEEKLY (ID:phoenixweekly)
White shoes, rose red pants, a short blue down jacket, a meter and a half tall, thin body, gray hair — around 1:30 p.m., 72-year-old Liu Dan finally appeared in surveillance video at a restaurant.
Pedestrians hurrying past did not notice her abnormality.
Zooming in on the screen can be seen that Liu Dan, walking on the sidewalk, is walking slower and slower, and his expression seems to be a little confused. She stopped and looked around, but soon walked straight forward with her hands behind her back. The elderly man with Alzheimer's has been away from home for more than 20 hours.
Although the memory of her family gradually fades and she always forgets where her home is, Liu Dan still retains the active personality of her youth - she is a cheerful old lady who loves to take the bus, love to run outside, and see the outside world. This also made her husband Chen Wen and daughter Chen Yu worried, they were always looking for her.
Early the next morning, Chen Yu went out to look for his mother. This time, she called the Beijing Volunteer Aid Emergency Rescue Team to help.
The monitor of the hotel once took a brief picture of Liu Dan passing by, and the captain of the rescue team, Ma Jian, followed the previous clues, checked the monitoring along the street shops in turn, and finally found her tracks.
Surveillance at a noodle shop captured a picture of Liu Dan walking by.
Image source: Courtesy of respondents
For People with Alzheimer's, it's often only a matter of seconds to get lost. Although there will be amnesia, aphasia, spatial loss and other symptoms, but from the appearance, they are no different from ordinary people, will not take the initiative to ask for help, others are difficult to find their abnormalities. This also makes search and rescue more difficult – in Beijing, a city of more than 20 million people, looking for an old man with amnesia is like finding a needle in a haystack.
Data show that on the mainland, the number of Elderly People with Alzheimer's disease that is lost every year is as high as about 200,000. As of 2019, China has more than 10 million Alzheimer's patients, the country with the largest number of patients in the world. Su Xi, the leader of the volunteer emergency rescue team, revealed that in the past five years or so, they have searched for nearly 330 lost elderly people, almost all of whom are Alzheimer's patients.
Su Xi remembers that the first old man was a chance encounter on the side of the road during the Spring Festival of 2016. In the cold winter, the old lady, dressed in a single dress, asked him for directions and said that she was going to the "grain store"—her memory was dialed back to the planned economy era that required food stamps to be exchanged, and Su Xi helped her call the police and find her family.
After that, Su Xi and the team members "picked up" the old man with amnesia in all corners of the city. Some old people fell into a large mud pit after getting lost, and when they were found, their faces were full of maggots; some old people got lost in the freight yard of the railway station, picked up rags and set up tents, and lived alone for several days; there was a retired former public security officer, who lost his memory in the gap between going to the public toilet, followed passers-by out of the alley and on the bus, he thought that the other party was a thief, he had not retired, and he was catching a thief.
One look
After Liu Dan disappeared, her 72-year-old husband, Chen Wen, blamed himself. The evening before, Chen Wen was going to go to his daughter's house, he thought about walking for ten minutes, and he would come back in a moment, let Liu Dan wait for him at home, and deliberately locked the door from outside.
After returning home, my wife and children were gone, and the locator that was usually pinned on clothes was not taken away.
Chen Wen and his daughter and son-in-law rode a battery car to the neighborhood for a night, calling the police and asking for help from the emergency rescue team.
According to surveillance video collected by the police, after Liu Dan came out of his home, he took the No. 88 bus from south to north at Niujie Prayer Temple Station at 18:47 - this bus from the north exit of Caoqiao East Road to Dazhongsi will pass through Xicheng, where Liu Dan's family is located. After 15 stops, at 19:36, Liu Dan got off at Jishuitan Bridge South Station. The clue is cut off.
Liu Dan took the No. 88 bus to get off at JishuitanQiao South Station, and has been gone since then, and the traffic situation here is complicated.
Source: Photo by Zhang Nanxi
"After getting out of the car, which direction did you go?" Or did she continue to get on another bus here? Which bus did she take and at which stop would she get off?" Chen Yu stood on the road and analyzed with the rescue team members. The sun was glaring, traffic and the noise was loud. Chen Yu came out of the unit on leave to find her mother, she was carrying a school bag, and the cuffs of the stormtrooper were stained with black dust. Because of insomnia and exhaustion, the eyes are a little red.
At the South Bus Station of Jishuitan Bridge, where the old man got off, buses came in and out. Every day, there are six buses that stop here, and two at night, many of which run outside the city. Across a road, opposite is a large shopping mall and construction site; behind the shops along the street, small alleys and forked roads stretch like branches.
This situation of no way to start is not unfamiliar to the rescue team members. In these five years, the most they spent 11 days looking for an old man; the fastest together, half an hour to find it smoothly in the subway. According to media statistics, less than half of these missing elderly people with Alzheimer's disease have returned home smoothly. And 24 hours is the golden time for search and rescue.
According to the arrangement of the rescue team, Chen Yu and the rescue team formed a squad of every four or five people - some people waited for new news at the police station, some people collected surveillance videos along the streets where the elderly had appeared, and some people posted notices at the entrance of the store.
Following the clues, they found Beijing Institute of Technology 7 kilometers away from JishuitanQiao South Station in Xicheng District, and there was no shadow of anyone again.
This is also common - "After the old man is lost, the traces that can be found are fragmentary, and the rescue team should try to find as many points as possible and then connect the points into a line." But whenever the line is almost connected, the clues are often broken." Ma Jian said.
Once they looked for an old man and found that he had entered an alley, and the previous monitor could see him, and there was no shadow in the monitor at a distance. The next day, I narrowed the scope and found a shop in the middle, and found that the old man stood in front of the glass door of the store at night and spoke to his shadow for five hours. But as soon as this opportunity was missed, they ran to the cement factory in Shijingshan to find him.
At 8 p.m., more than 24 hours after Liu Dan's disappearance, volunteers after a long day of walking around, squatting directly by the sidewalk flower beds to rest, or resting against a telephone pole, and then continuing after a few minutes.
They always walk from morning to night, from Xicheng District to Haidian District, handing out leaflets, checking and monitoring, and speculating on the traces of the elderly.
Continuing to walk forward, it is the Gongqiao bus stop in Haidian District, and the search seems to be back to the original point. There are more cars here than at the South Bus Station of Dianjishuitan Bridge, and the rescue team deduced according to Liu Dan's behavior pattern that if she was tired, she might board the bus here as before.
The bus station is a huge obstacle to search and rescue. There are as many directions as there are buses, and there are dozens of stops per bus, and it is impossible to check and monitor them one by one. In addition, when retrieving the monitoring of relevant road sections and buses, it is also necessary to go through the cumbersome handover procedures between different departments.
It was already dark, and the danger of the old man being alone was increasing. Chen Yu was worried about her mother, but she couldn't think of where her destination would be.
Chen Wen remembered that the day before he was lost, his wife and children were thinking about going home. The family speculated that the "home" she said should be the old alley where she had lived for many years. Before going to the countryside at the age of 18, Liu Dan had been living in guozi lane and Yingxin Street old hutong in Xicheng District, and at the age of 29, she also worked nearby after returning to Beijing with her child, which was her mother's family.
Liu Dan's "home" was once the most lively area of old Xuanwu. Merchants and homes, one by one, are crowded with small alleys that are less than ten meters wide and no more than 100 meters in length. There are breakfast shops selling small bean porridge, oil and salt shops, velvet shops, shoe shops, shaving sheds... In the summer when the cicadas are singing endlessly, there is never an interesting thing to catch and stick to, and she and her wife always remember the nursery rhymes under the big locust tree.
In the summer of 2007, liu dan's home was razed to the ground as a dangerous renovation project followed the renovation of houses in the old city and the CITIC City community, which now stands with dense residential buildings. It was also that year that Liu Dan's mother died.
At night, volunteers were still at the newsstand on the street asking if they had seen the lost old man.
Judging from the only clues, Liu Dan did not seem to have returned to her home in the hutong, she went farther and farther, and the WeigongCun overpass that finally appeared was more than ten kilometers away from "home". Rescue team members gathered on the side of the road to analyze the four possible directions of the elderly at the intersection, and continued to ask commercial and residential users along the street to check the monitoring; Chen Yu also asked the police of the Niujie police station at the place where the case was reported, and cooperated with the police station under the jurisdiction of the old man WeiGong Village to communicate and negotiate; at the same time, they were also trying to find a way to go to the bus stop to find clues.
It was almost 11 o'clock in the evening, and when everyone decided to retreat and look for it again the next day, Chen Yu received a call from the police station, and the person found it.
She rushed to the police station and learned that when her mother walked into the Lotus community, she was found by the security guard that something was wrong - at night before five degrees Celsius, she was wearing only a single coat, and the down jacket was lost. The security guard repeatedly asked her where her home was, but she couldn't answer, so she called the Yangfang shop police station. After arriving at the police station, Liu Dan briefly remembered her name, although she said a wrong word, but she mentioned her sister's name again, and the police found her information based on these clues.
Seeing Chen Yu, although the old man could not hide his fatigue, he was as happy as a child. She told her family that she would tell them about the road the next day. But the next morning, she completely forgot about her runaway and getting lost.
Cannibalized memories
This is not the first time Liu Dan has gone missing. In the past two years, daughter Chen Yu and husband Chen Wen have always been looking for her.
In 2016, Liu Dan was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. In order to prevent the loss of contact, at first, Chen Yu bought a positioning watch, and the large watch was worn on his mother's thin wrist, which looked very abrupt. She was afraid that her mother's self-esteem would be hurt, so she changed it to a halter-neck, but the old man often forgot to wear it. Later, she bought a small box locator with an anti-theft buckle and a magnet nail to attach to the clothes.
But the locator is also not a panacea. Once Chen Wen took Liu Dan out to pick up his grandson, he turned around and locked the door for a few minutes, and when he turned around, Liu Dan was gone. Chen Yugang left work and quickly asked his father to pick up the child and look for his mother by himself. She looked at the screen of her mobile phone, and her mother's anchor moved farther and farther away, stopping near Sihuidong.
"Don't move!" The locator was automatically connected after being called three times, and Chen Yu shouted at the end of the mobile phone with all his might, trying to stop his mother, but his mother ignored her. Liu Dan got out of the car, still holding a bag of garbage that he had brought out of the house and forgot to throw away. In the quiet gap, a passerby waiting for the car heard a shout from Liu Dan's body, and quickly spoke to Chen Yu and helped her see her mother.
"Now I get lost because I lose my sense of space, and I started with the loss of memory." Chen Yu said. One afternoon after finding her mother, Chen Yu sat with her father and talked about her mother's illness, and she handed her mother a thin piece of melon.
Because his teeth were gone, Liu Dan's cheeks were somewhat sunken, and his mouth grinned widely when he smiled. At this time, she sat by and listened intently to the father and daughter talking about their own affairs, as if they were listening to other people's stories. "I listen to you, can this be me?" She suddenly laughed at herself.
Change starts little by little.
Liu Dan is an outgoing and neat old lady. More than a decade ago, she was a tai chi player in Taoranting Park, took the junior coaching certificate, and the mustang mane stretched her strength; she also participated in community volunteer activities and patrolled the community with friends.
Around 2009, Liu Dan suddenly told Chen Yu that he didn't want to play tai chi anymore, and his teammates said that he was "depressed". Chen Yu didn't pay too much attention, thinking that she was just having an unpleasant affair with her teammates. Now that she remembers the word "depression," she feels extremely uncomfortable.
The earliest symptom is a change in temperament. Around 2010, Liu Dan became sloppy in cooking. Chen Yu's husband remembers that when a guest came to the house, Liu Dan, who had always been hospitable, brought a large plate of casually mixed cold dishes to the table and said, "We Beijingers eat like this." There are also staple foods, rice steamed buns, which are often mixed together and served on the table.
The most impressive one was that after Liu Dan was busy in the kitchen, the pot disappeared. The family searched for half a day and found that the pot was standing at the foot of the dining table, and the pot handle was facing upwards, as if it was draining water.
Chen Yu's big collapse was to find that the milk powder that her mother had made for her eldest daughter was wrong. "A spoonful of milk powder, 30 ml of water," she told her mother. One day, she saw her mother mix only two scoops of milk powder in 90 milliliters of water. Chen Yu was anxious, "Because of the child's business, I only trust my mother, and when I found her like this, I really broke down." That time, she yelled out to her mother.
When Liu Dan was young, he loved to play tai chi, love to climb mountains, and love to participate in volunteer activities, but after suffering from Alzheimer's disease, he gradually stopped participating in group activities.
Image source: Courtesy of the interviewee
Because they did not live together, Chen Yu felt that his mother's change was fragmentary, and Chen Wen had a more obvious experience - his old partner, who had always been good-natured, began to lose his temper over trivial matters, and ran away from home without a word. She no longer participates in group activities and forgets her agreement with friends. Before she retired, she was an accounting supervisor who loved to do math problems, and after retirement, she taught herself programming on a desktop computer; later she never opened the computer again and did not study.
In 2016, Chen Yu gave birth to her second child, and Liu Dan took care of her in the hospital. When accompanying the bed, Liu Dan always took a book to kill time. One day, Chen Yu asked her mother to read a passage from the book to her. Liu Dan read out individual words, not coherent paragraphs. She didn't know what the book was saying anymore.
Chen Yu made up his mind to take his mother to the doctor. Soon, Liu Dan was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease at Xuanwu Hospital. Chen Yu finally knew that there was a reason for her mother's unwarranted anger, the estrangement from the outside world, and her incomprehension of her relatives. She was sick.
Chen Wencha data, sought medical treatment everywhere, and collected 38 Alzheimer's scales at home and abroad. Chen Yu also bought books on brain science to study and watch related movies. They kept searching their memories for possible causes—the tiny meningioma that Liu Dan had; the death of her mother, who had been too much of a stimulus; or some other missing detail?
But globally, there is still no absolute cause of Alzheimer's disease, and no drug can cure it. Liu Dan, like all people with Alzheimer's disease, her memories are eroded little by little, she remembers things from the past, but forgets what she ate in the morning and at noon.
She had fewer and fewer words in her mouth, leaving only "this, that." Once, after washing clothes in the washing machine at home, the "tick" sounded, and Liu Dan wanted to remind Chen Yu to dry her clothes, telling her that "that" sounded. Chen Yu encouraged her mother and said the word washing machine, but she couldn't say anything. Occasionally, she forgets the names of her family. When Chen Wen was not around, Liu Dan would ask his daughter, "Where did that person go?" When she is in a good state, she can say the name of her wife and children.
Later, like a child, she quietly threw the leftover apple cores into the downstairs neighbor's car, and then closed the screen window. Until the neighbor complained, Chen Yu learned of the old lady's prank and replaced the home with an aluminum screen window that was to be opened with a key.
The door lock at home also made Chen Yu and Chen Wen think hard. Last year, Chen Wen's mother fell ill, he was taken care of in the hospital, worried that Liu Dan was not safe at home alone, and when she went out, he would tell her to use the key to lock the door from the house. But after Liu Dan locked it, he would always forget to pull out the key and could not open the door from the outside, so the family changed the lock at least eight times. Last year, Chen Yu installed a fingerprint lock for his parents' home, but Liu Dan's fingerprint became shallow and it was difficult to use.
"This piece is the hippocampus, which is shrinking, which means that she has fewer and fewer memories left." Alzheimer's causes a certain protein substance in her brain to be secreted too much, and eventually the substance will spread throughout her brain until nothing is remembered." Chen Yu took out the brain science book she bought, turned to a page of colored brain maps, pointed to the small piece in the middle, and imagined the lesions that were happening in her mother's brain.
Love and companionship can make the inevitable end come a little later
"Alzheimer's disease cannot be stopped, it can only be postponed, relying on the company of family." The doctor told Chen Yu and Chen Wen.
Liu Dan has a clear memory of the distant past, and as soon as Chen Wen has time, he will talk to her about things half a century ago——
In 1968, at the age of 18, they were full of energy and boarded a green-skinned train bound for the Northern Wilderness Corps. In a small northeastern county town near the Ussuri River, the two met and fell in love. "When we climbed the watchtower, we could see the lame Soviet captain across the Ussuri River."
Listening to Chen Wen talk about those days, Liu Dan smiled and nodded his head.
After marriage, they established a family in a small northeastern city, Chen Wen worked as a veterinarian, and later transferred to the hospital. When the winter in the northeast was at its coldest level, at minus 41 degrees, Chen Wen carried the medicine box on his back and rode to a company more than a dozen miles away. Liu Dan is a math teacher. Her school is not crowded, and a junior high school has been added to the primary school, similar to hat-wearing, also known as "hat-wearing middle school". She taught in the sixth grade and the first grade, and some students later became senior engineers at the Sinopec Design Institute.
In the 11th year of the corps, daughter Chen Yu was born, and they began to look forward to the transfer back to Beijing. When her daughter was 42nd day old, Liu Dan's order came first, and she took the swaddled daughter on the train back to Beijing; later, Chen Wen also returned to Beijing.
After returning to Beijing, the two of them, like all the young people who returned to the city, took over the class of the previous generation. Chen Wen entered the Beijing Jade Factory, Liu Dan first took his mother's class to the street factory in the hutong, took several jobs, and before retiring, he was the accounting and financial supervisor of the public institution.
In Chen Yu's eyes, there was always endless energy in her mother.
In addition to taking care of the family, my mother took the accounting qualification certificate with a pass rate of less than five percent that year, and successfully jumped jobs with her own efforts, from the street factory, to the district, to the city. Her mother loves sports, Chen Yu took her to climb the mountain, and she walked faster than a young person. In the 1990s, Liu Dan began to learn programming languages and doS operating systems. When the son-in-law came back from work, she always saw the old lady sitting in front of the computer playing a game of free solitaire. Her casual games also include solving math problems.
"I knit this myself, do you think it's okay?" I think it's not bad." Liu Dan, who was on the side, took off his hat and handed it over. The red beanie has a fine hook and a thin gray rim on the brim. She wears a red fleece jacket and the words "West End Volunteer" printed on her chest – a previous community-given gift from the event.
The families of Alzheimer's patients often use various methods to try to retrieve their memories, and the same is true of Xiaotuo, a girl from Guangdong. She videotaped the entire process of finding her grandfather.
Brought up by Grandpa, Xiao Tuo was under the impression that he was a kind and kind old man, smiling with a big grin and revealing two front teeth, like her favorite SpongeBob SquarePants. Grandpa rode a car every day to take Her to school through the field path. Little toto loves to play with dolls, and Grandpa will make hangers for dolls. Xiao Tuo was afraid to sleep alone at night, and Grandpa told her bedtime stories and played a childish ghost to scare her.
But in recent years, after Grandpa suffered from Alzheimer's disease, he lost his vitality. Every day he lay in bed, and in addition to eating and drinking Lazar, he would only say, "No more!" He always looked wooden and stared blankly. Grandpa no longer remembers who his family is, and the family's memories are gradually fading. Xiao Tuo wanted to find his former grandfather and saw the old man's smile again.
In order to find his grandfather's memory, Xiao Tuo put the "Lu Binghua" he once liked to him, and grandpa forgot how to laugh, but cried out.
Image source: Video screenshot
She accompanied her grandfather to watch her favorite cartoons when she was a child, and his grandfather was absent-minded. She pinched a repeat duck called "Grandpa, Grandpa" in front of Grandpa, and Grandpa walked away without reaction. Her boyfriend played the clown and danced against Grandpa, whose expression became heavier.
She also returned to the place where she and her grandfather had lived, but everything changed. After an entire block of nearby buildings was razed, a bridge was built. The old house they had lived in had been turned into a parking lot under the bridge. When leaving, the train on the tracks next to it drove by. She remembered that in the past, Grandpa would take her to the railway tracks to see the scenery, but now only the sound of the howling wind was still there.
Back at home, Xiao Tuo listened to grandpa the "Lu Binghua" he used to listen to, and the old man's facial expression began to change - he muttered his mouth, very aggrieved look, the wrinkles of his brows gathered, his eyes narrowed, and a few tears rolled down. Little transparent white, Grandpa has forgotten how to laugh, his cry is his laugh.
This short journey to find Grandpa ends with Grandpa becoming more angry the next day. Xiao Tuo thought that all his efforts were in vain, and he regretted going back to work in the big city. A few days later, she received a call from her grandmother, who excitedly told Xiao Tuo that grandpa took the initiative to come out of the bedroom in the morning and move to the dinner table with crutches. He washed his own clothes. He had been sitting in his chair, looking at the couch where Xiao Tuo had sat, as if he were silently waiting and thinking about something.
"At the end of Alzheimer's disease, people become extremely demented. Their brains are like the land after the fire, leaving only a ruin. They will even forget to swallow and defecate, and man becomes an empty shell without a soul, and there is no difference between death and death."
Xiaotuo is not optimistic about the future, but after this attempt to find her grandfather, she believes that love and companionship can make the inevitable end come a little later.
The more brutal side
In the past two years, as his mother's illness has become more and more serious, Chen Yu can feel that his father has become difficult to take care of his mother alone.
On December 8 last year, Chen Wen went to the hospital to see his teeth and took Liu Dan with him. Before entering the clinic, he took off his winter cotton clothes, documents and school bags, handed them to Liu Dan together, and repeatedly instructed her to wait outside the door. But after seeing the teeth come out, she's gone. Chen Wen panicked and got into the car, dressed in a single dress to meet his daughter, looking for Liu Dan. Finally, the security guard on the bus saw Liu Dan's information board, contacted the family, and sent the old man to the bus terminal.
After becoming caring and being cared for in roles, their lives are always so "chaotic". Chen Wen must look at Liu Dan at any time and take care of her to wash her face, eat, and go to the toilet. Liu Dan went to the toilet, sometimes there were stool stains on the toilet wall, Chen Wen went to his daughter's house to get a water gun to flush the toilet. But he still did his best to keep his wife and children clean, even the nail seams were fresh.
The trivial and oppressive everyday life was hidden in his occasional paintings—the black rain mist filled the whole picture, the atmosphere was oppressive, and in the lower left corner there was a slender figure walking alone in the chaos with an umbrella, and beside him there was a narrow white space and a sporadic green. Chen Wen called this painting "Loneliness", which painted his own state of mind. Not long ago, his 105-year-old mother also died.
One of Chen Wen's paintings is called "Solitude.". Painting is his way of expressing his inner feelings. Outside of caring for his Alzheimer's wife, he rarely has time of his own.
Su Xie, who has been in contact with hundreds of Families of Alzheimer's patients, also believes that Alzheimer's disease is the loneliest disease, and the families who care for patients are equally lonely, "Especially in the post-80s one-child family." The old man is lost, and may not even have a friend to look for."
He and his team tried to make the old man less lonely, but they also saw a more brutal side to the illness.
Once, the team members helped the post-80s only daughter working in a central enterprise to find her father. The old man had Alzheimer's disease, did not know how to flush the toilet after pooping, and his daughter and wife did not let him go to the toilet at home. One day, the old man went to the public toilet outside to finish the toilet, and suddenly could not find the way home. After a day of getting lost, her daughter did not take it seriously, until she talked to her colleagues at work the next day, and was reminded that she should look for the elderly.
After the rescue team found the old man, they made him a bowl of noodles. The noodles were just soft, the daughter rushed to the fire, the old man saw the daughter, like a child who did something wrong, quickly pushed the instant noodles away, did not dare to eat. Su Xi guessed that the old man should be often blamed at home, so he was so afraid of his daughter getting angry.
"Girl, it's very nice to have a father here." My father is gone, and I want to ask him something now, so I can only sit in front of the cemetery grave. Only without you can know. So your dad is still there, so cherish it." On the way back, Su Xi told the old man's daughter. But after a while, when he wanted to visit back, he found that he had been deleted.
They also helped find an 89-year-old former railroad soldier. The old man was lost for nine days, and when they found the eighth day, the old man's second daughter solemnly told the search and rescue team members that they would not look for it. The reason is that the whole family has taken seven days off and continues to look for it, fearing that the job is gone.
The Beijing Volunteer Aid Emergency Rescue Team is looking for the lost elderly.
There is also the longest time together, looking for 11 days, but also the family gave up first. But a team member was more real, with two college student volunteers to keep looking, and finally found the old man.
Because he had been lost outside for too long, the old man was already very weak, and they first sent the old man to a hospital. The family did not answer the call from the volunteers and the police station until the police went to knock on the door of the house to inform the news. The first reaction of the family is not to be happy that the old man has been found, but to complain about the volunteers, why not send the old man to another hospital that is closer.
"Nor can we blame such children, who have a difficult scripture to read." Su Xi said that behind every lost amnesiac elderly person, there is a specific family and people, facing different problems, but reflecting similar social problems such as family affection, companionship, and separation. But he still hopes that every elderly person with Alzheimer's disease can walk the last journey of life with more dignity.
During this time, because of the epidemic, Chen Yu's youngest son studied at home. Often spending time with the child, Liu Dan seems to have become active. The six-year-old asked my grandmother, what do you say my name is? Grandma's eyes widened and she asked him, "What do you say your name is?" The child reminded her of the first two words one by one, and she finally said the third word. The family applauded, and she couldn't keep her mouth shut.
"Even with this disease, she is dignified, we are always with her, we can feel her love." 」
Chen Yu said that when she watched the movie "Still Alice" about Alzheimer's patients in the early years, it was like seeing herself and her mother. At the end of the film, the daughter reads a verse to her mother and asks her if she can understand what the poem is about. My mother, who used to be a professor of linguistics and expressed a lot of feelings, was stunned for a few seconds, and finally slowly said the word "love".
(At the request of the interviewee, Liu Dan, Chen Wen, and Chen Yu are pseudonyms.) ）
Author: Zhang Nanxi
Edit: Sydney King
First image source: Stand Cool Helo