Customer Reviews

25 Months: A Memoir

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Though a usual mark of Alzheimer's is how gradually the disease comes on, not so for Linda Stewart's husband, who wakes one afternoon from a nap, disoriented and barely responsive. The author, thinking he may have had a stroke, calls for an ambulance--only to find, the next morning in the hospital, that there is no "hemispheric damage" or indication of a stroke. Jack Stewart has come down with Alzheimer's, seemingly in the space of a couple of hours.

What a razor's edge we live on--which gives this story its weight. The onset of Jack Stewart's Alzheimer's comes as "a severe, delusionary, psychotic episode"--but the result is much the same as with a patient whose dementia has crept into view over months or even years. From the title we guess the end, that Jack Stewart, previously strong and healthy, will die after 25 months.

The author puts up a valiant struggle to keep her husband at home, to keep him involved. Her "rival" for Jack's attentions becomes sleep: "As soon as breakfast was over, `I think I'll just go lie down for while." Or, "If I left him alone for only the few moments it took to prepare lunch, to attend to the laundry or tidy the kitchen, he would grope to our bed and fall at once into deep sleep."

She doesn't want him to drift off, to give up, to disappear from her life. But of course he's going to. After her valiant struggle she writes a valiant book. She is left with her memories, and we are left with an engaging portrait of a man in his prime, abruptly laid low.