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Alzheimer: Do Ghosts Cry? | home

Love ;

We have all been told by our Chiefs that we could not perform if we did not put a distance between us and the clients.

In our heart we knew that we could not perform well if we did not share the life of our clients;

Our Chiefs knew the risks; they wanted us not to burn out.

We knew that if we did not burn, we would die freezing.

Like any aging man, I know that it is likely that one day I will be cared for by a hospital. A hospital, it means nurses (men and women). What should I bee for them?

It is not difficult to build human relationships with those that will care for you; true, some will be indifferent to you, some will even dislike you intensively, some will consider you as a fellow human being.

If there is empathy between the caring and the cared, it means that whatever I will suffer will be a part in their life.

I will enter into their reality. I will become part of “them”.

When I walk in the street of Paris, I come in contact with hundreds and thousands of other passer by, yet I share nothing with them. For one another we are just a shadow.

Once you have made a contact with a human being, what should you do?

A contact means that his eyes went into my eyes, my eyes went into his eyes, I am an image which is part of his world, he is an image which is part of my world, when I die, the image remains in his memory, but it is an unsustainable image, an image which starts withering like an old photo, an image that suffers, but an image that suffers inside me, it is also “I that suffers.

During the years mother was an Alzheimer patient, most of the caring staff I met, had learned not to see in her or any other patient a human being, they had learned to see in them a client that had to be served according to the terms of the contract. The smiles were part of the contract, they were plastic smiles. I think I agree with them, when distributing cool water in hell you cannot afford to listen to the cries of the damned.

When I worked as an agronomist in Africa, from village to village we would see dying children, sick adults with little hope of even hoping for a peaceful and painless death. In my car I carried my rations for a couple of days; I could have shared them, what would be the point?

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As an agronomist, entering a hut I would see a child in the arms of his mother, dying of the most stupid disease invented, of diarrhoea. The child would have contacted it from spoiled water. The child would survive or not survive. The sickness of the child and his likely death were absurd, the parents could have made sure that the water had been boiled, they would not have done it, this was not the way things were done.

As an agronomist I had been trained into rehydrating children, I would show them how to make a salt and sugar mixture with any kind of available ingredient, I would show them how to get the rehydration mixture into the child's mouth drop buy drop, I would have shown them not to dip their finger in the liquid to make a contaminated drop that they would drop into the child's mouth. We would do it together, I would leave, I would come back to the village a week, two weeks later, what happened to the child, <<he died>>, did you give him the salt and sugar solution as we agreed, <<oh yes they had done that>>, so why did he not survive, <<he did not want to drink>>. And that was that, the child had died.

I was an agronomist, not a doctor, it was my job to feed them, not to teach them how not to die, yet inside myself, the anger and the sadness were setting their roots.

And that was only the easy side of our activity. In the compound, they would go on with their lives and when things went wrong they would come to us and we would learn to know the families, the wifes, the drunken husbands that would drink in one night any money they could lay their hands on, starvation. We would learn to know the children, children so far away from life that given a ball they would not know what to do with it, they had been so ill treated that the notion of “playing” was no part of their lifes.

So we learned to care, learned to worry for them, learned to ensure that they were fed, were clothed, were trained. The children became part of our life. How many children can you carry in your hart, how many lost wars can you endure until you despair?

As teachers, we have children to take care of; these children can very easily learn the subjects. The subjects have been so much simplified, the teaching methods have been so well developed, that learning is easy; Learning is available for any child, he does not need to have a brilliant intelligence. Day after day, weeks after weeks, months after months the children break your heart, they refuse in a passive way to enter into the house. In the same way that the mothers accepted the refusal of their children to open their mouth and let them die, in the dame way the teacher has to accept that the children will refuse to open their ears and eyes and brains and let them die of knowledge starvation.

As a teacher you cannot accept that, the children break your heart. True all teachers are not similar, some can tell you the name of each one, years back, some do not even remember the name of that term's children. If you are a good teacher, you must consider the children as non-human blobs, some will develop into intelligent and understanding human beings, some will remain blobs. As a good teacher you know that some of the blobs that appear to be wasted cases will suddenly mushroom out into active and brilliant human beings, some you to whom you gave your trust and hope will wither and turn into decaying lives. The old teacher's nights are full of faces, and you wonder at what time you did wrong, what did you do that turned away the children from a life of richness and plunged them into the fog of nothingness?

Even more stupid, as a villager, you see all kind of cats and dogs minding their own business in their animal like way. Until you discover that their owner has left, that the animals are foraging into anything they can find, that the animals are more and more relying on you to ensure their survival, who will tell us at what time you can turn your eyes away and let the animal die covered by vermin?

These days, many armed conflicts are going on, few of them conducted with the Geneva Convention Rules, what should a commanding Officer do about his soldiers, should he befriend them, be a comrade, or should he see them as an armed resource to be used to the best of the Interests of the Group? How many dead comrades can you endure before you either break down or harden to an oak heart immune to humanity?

Compassion?

Either you share and cry and finally the scars on your heart make you die of internal bleeding.

Or you refuse empathy and you die to this humanity of the concrete setting in your heart.