Alzheimer’s: A former justice’s lesson in love

Throughout her Supreme Court career, Sandra Day O’Connor was known for tempering her rulings with “a concern for how laws applied to real life,” said USA Today in an editorial. Her compassion, it’s now clear, was more than just a judicial philosophy. O’Connor retired from the court last year to help care for her husband, John, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. Last week, one of the O’Connors’ sons said in a TV interview that his father had fallen in love with a fellow patient at his nursing home in Phoenix, and that “Mom was thrilled that Dad was relaxed and happy.” After years of anguish and depression, their son said, John O’Connor is behaving “like a teenager in love,” and has a new reason for living. Sandra O’Connor could easily have kept quiet about this very intimate development, said The Philadelphia Inquirer, but chose to go public to comfort others in similar circumstances. “In deed more than word,” she’s teaching all of us a valuable lesson—“that sometimes love means letting go.”

That’s a lesson more and more of us are going to have to face, said Lisa Anderson in the Chicago Tribune. There are currently 5.1 million Americans with Alzheimer’s, 4.9 million of them over the age of 65, which is when this “life-shattering disease” usually strikes—first in the form of mild forgetfulness, followed by a progressive descent into confusion and amnesia. When the first baby boomers turn 65 in 2011, those figures will soar, perhaps to as high as 16 million. At that point, society will have to swallow its distaste and figure out how to deal with the fact that in nursing homes there’s plenty of romance, hand-holding, and, yes, sometimes sex. Can Alzheimer’s patients even consent to intimacy? Can families demand that a couple be separated even if they want to be together? These will not be easy questions to answer.

True enough, especially because they’re so new, said Kate Zernike in The New York Times. We’ve all been conditioned to think of love as the heart-pounding, breathless passion of the young—not the complex feelings shared by two time-ravaged people who spend afternoons holding hands, as a defense against loneliness, disease, and death. Nor do we usually think of love as the kind of selflessness O’Connor is now demonstrating, swallowing any jealousy so that her husband of 55 years—who no longer even recognizes her—can find some solace in his final days. “So this,

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in the end, is what love is.”