Still Alice- Plot and Character

The book starts off showing the amazing career Alice has and the intelligence she uses to teach, lecture and travel the world talking about languages and psychology. She is proud of her successful adult children and they joy they bring to her life. The book ends with Alice living with her youngest daughter and Alice’s husband moving to New York for his new job. Throughout the book there have been struggles between Alice and her husband about the way to treat her diagnosis and then with the kids after they are informed of their mothers condition. All of Alice’s children are educated and know what the outcome of the disease will be for their mother. Alice’s mental diagnosis of Early Onset Dementia has caused her to forget names and relevance of her family members but knows how she feels when she’s around them. All these behaviours are typical of this type of disease/mental illness. I predict the problem will be the amount of time they can keep Alice at home. As Alice says “I won’t be locked up”. The family looks into different option to keep Alice safe as she has began to wander and lose the ability to do her own personal care. The placement of Alice causes great distress and differences of opinions between her adult children and their father. Often families having to deal with a loved one having dementia often is a cause for disagreements as everyone has their own ideas of how they want to care for the person living with dementia. I feel the arguments can be productive as it help everyone says what they feel and what ideas they have to take care of their loved one as well as relieve some the stress that they feel about what is happening to their loved one. They way the author portrayed Alice’s thoughts as she went through the process of dementia and her thought seemed to be plausible as to what someone with early onset dementia may think or react as the disease progresses. Throughout the book the author has kept up with one ongoing thought that Alice has which is the folder on her computer that contains the way to end all her suffering. This demonstrates the level of fear that Alice had to put such plans into place, unfortunately this is not a rare occurrence and thoughts of suicide are real for people suffering with dementia. It has been a while since I finished the book and I still find times where I think about Alice’s story and what would I do if it were me. What would anybody do?