This is all too real, and all too painful, and I have seen this close up professionally for decades.

My wife, a saint, cares for later stage Alz. patients who usually also have complex medical issues. It is a world most of us have never seen.

If you are lucky, your children will be raised before you deal with elderly parents. Makes it a little easier, but not that much.

I have admired Sarah Polley as an actress ever since I saw her in The Sweet Hereafter. It doesn't surprise me that she could direct.

My mother has Alzheimer's Disease. She has lived with me for almost five years now. I have a live in caretaker to help with her. I think we are near the end - probably within a year or so. It is like combat - impossible for a person who has not been through it to truly understand it.

This subject (marriages, Alzheimer's, old age) is fraught with such current pain and future worry that I think that I would have liked to have been warned as to the subject matter.

That said, it looks extraordinary.

Ugh. Alzheimers is such a nasty disease. My grandmother had it, and at the end I was the only one she responded to--but because I looked exactly like my father when he was younger. Everyone else in the family she couldn't recognize at all, and me she thought was him. It was incredibly sad. And so hard on the people she couldn't remember.

What does the unofficial blog wife think? Or are there also wives, catamites, etc. to be polled?

Quite separately, professor, will you please give us the option of a syndicated feed?