The Force of Fortitude

I once saw a segment on CBS Sunday Morning about someone with Alzheimer's disease.  "There are no survivors of Alzheimer's," the voice-over announced.

Loosing your memories can rob you of your most precious commodity in life: the very life you've lived, in fact.  Without the ability to recall your experiences and the specificities of relationships, the landscape of a life is irrevocably altered.

There are other evils in the world, too. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) -- more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease -- can slowly shut down the body so that its victim loses the ability to move arms and legs, speak, and (eventually) breathe. The body becomes a prison for the mind, which still functions and knows its destiny, knows the approach of its own mortality, knows the fate that will shut down its faculties.

Tony Judt was a British historian, essayist, and professor at New York University who died from ALS in August of 2010. He composed the collection of personal essays in his posthumously published book, The Memory Chalet, while lying awake at night (paralyzed from the neck down), using a mnemonic technique to place items in a visualized space. He memorized paragraphs of text to dictate to his assistant the following day.

Judt wrote:

It is not as though you lose the desire to stretch,

to bend, to stand or lie or run or even exercise.

But when the urge comes over you there is nothing --

nothing -- that you can do except seek some tiny

substitute or else find a way to suppress the

thought and the accompanying muscle memory.

Thomas Nagel, in the New York Review of Books, describes The Memory Chalet as "eloquent personal recollections...infused with historical consciousness" and an "articulate recreation of the active life that he has lost is Judt's answer to his imprisonment and impending death."

  

Judt's elegant memoir encounters its greatest complexities when he grapples with his Jewishness.

Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective

self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling...

It is not enough to stand at a tangent to other

peoples' conventions; we should also be the

most unforgiving critics of our own.

Reading about personal tribulations like this or Christopher Hitchens's esophageal cancer, I'm confounded by the uncertainty of how I could process the prognosis if I were in a similar predicament.  From whence comes the fortitude?