There’s a brewhaha over Julie Christie’s little throw-away line after she accepted the Screen Actor’s Guild Award for Best Actress. Apparently, she made a joke about forgetting to name some of the people she should have thanked. The article quotes Peter Braun, who runs the California Southland chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association who said: “It is no laughing matter. People don’t laugh about cancer; people don’t laugh about AIDS. We call on the academy to use this moment for good, as it has done for so many other social causes.”
But people do laugh. And they have to, just to stay sane and release a little stress and tension. Angels in America is one of the funniest, saddest, most powerful pieces of American theatre – ever. And it’s about AIDS. I do understand Braun’s point. There are jokes about “senior moments” that don’t do justice to the grief and loss that can accompany a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. Laughter certainly can’t be the ONLY response. But if we ban laughter, we ban the full human response to the experience of dementia. When it comes to Alzheimer’s, as my friend Karen Stobbe says, “Sometimes, ya gotta laugh.”
You are so right. Many care givers would go mad if they could not laugh along with the tears that come during this process. We are not laughing at the person with dementia, we are laughing at the life that is happening around us.
good blog!