In 2004 Rachel Hadas's husband, George Edwards, a composer and professor of music at Columbia University, was diagnosed with early-onset dementia at the age of sixty-one. "It's a feedback loop." thoughtful and lucid tale of love, companionship, and heartbreaking illness." -Lydia Davis "The wonderful thing about literature is that literature helps us to live our lives, and life helps us to pay attention to literature," says Hadas. "But presumably, that's not what Anderson intended." Novels, she notes, can do the same - like "Hans Christian Anderson's creepy, wonderful story The Snow Queen." The protagonist's "cold, heartless behavior looks like the behavior of someone with frototemporal dementia," says Hadas. "I like to say to my students that a really successful poem floats free of its occasion, and floats free of any intention," she says. That's the transformative power of literature - the power to make it one's own - that Hadas, a professor of English at Rutgers University, tries to instill in her students. It's just startling when things come back and kind of hit you." read it the first time and miss most of the point, and then you come back to it. Hadas believes that anything worth reading is worth re-reading. "It's not so much that I said, OK, I think I'm going to re-read David Copperfield now." But as her husband piled up pages of his essays in their apartment she says she was reminded of the pleasant but confused character of Mr. Hadas also discovered entirely new insights into her experience while re-reading old favorites, from Greek classics to Charles Dickens. "But it takes a lot to make us pay attention." "Having read and taught Greek tragedy since I was in my early 20s, I really should have known this," says Hadas. "It's enormously reassuring to realize not necessarily that other people have coped with this disease, though they have, but that they have coped with things that are just as hard or harder. It "is terribly lonely and confusing to live with," she says.
Literature also helped Hadas manage the loneliness of losing a spouse to a disease known as frontotemporal dementia. "Poetry helped me to be a little less stupid as I stumbled through the process." George's disease "presented an enormous cognitive challenge, not only for him but for me," with a very steep learning curve, she says. but consistently to figure out what I was feeling at a given time." since my father died when I was 17, I've turned to poetry not only to express my feelings. "Poetry has always been a way of coping for me. Not so much to console, she says, but just to help her manage. As Hadas negotiated the years before George moved to an assisted living facility, reading and writing became Hadas' life line.
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