Alzheimer's disease and personal identity

My sister and I had inklings of a slow atrophying of my mother’s mind, perhaps of her very self, before she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in April, 2008. And yet, strangely, I’d also noticed around that time she’d seemed to be more “herself.” So I felt oddly reassured at the news. The diagnosis seemed to explain something about who my mother was, perhaps who she’d been most of my life. Due to its seeming genetic component, we believed the type to be early-onset. It could have started when I was still a kid.

This is how Elizabeth Kadetsky begins an op-ed piece in the New York Times, in which she reflects on her former-fashion-model mother, now living-in-the-moment mother with Alzheimer's. The author compares the present-moment essence of Alzheimer's with the practice of yoga, in that the past and future are absent from thought.

An interesting and touching reflection on a mother-daughter relationship and the influence the disease has on it.

It seems to me that the disease "enhances" the most recognized personality traits by robbing the individual of their multi-faceted and nuanced identity, so that, in the end, their most prominent traits are all that remain. Hopefully, for most of us, our prominent traits are our pleasant ones.