A few minutes ago on Twitter, I saw some Brazilian writers I follow retweeting a link to a Brazilian newspaper that reports that Nobel Prize laureate Gabriel García Márquez is suffering from dementia (link is to the Google Translate translation of the article). While not confirmed by his family, it does sound as though the circumstantial evidence strongly indicates that Gabo is indeed suffering from senile dementia.
This new saddens me greatly. Not just because I am a fan of his works, but also because it was less than a year ago that my maternal grandmother was entering the last stages of her dementia before she died in November. The way the journalists cited in the article describe Gabo's comments is eerily similar to how my grandmother would greet members of the family whenever we would come to visit. The repetition of general questions, the masking of forgetfulness, the pattern of conversation – all of that described in the article was what we witnessed with my grandmother.
Hopefully, this information is a hoax...but I fear that it may not be.
This new saddens me greatly. Not just because I am a fan of his works, but also because it was less than a year ago that my maternal grandmother was entering the last stages of her dementia before she died in November. The way the journalists cited in the article describe Gabo's comments is eerily similar to how my grandmother would greet members of the family whenever we would come to visit. The repetition of general questions, the masking of forgetfulness, the pattern of conversation – all of that described in the article was what we witnessed with my grandmother.
Hopefully, this information is a hoax...but I fear that it may not be.
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1 comment:
My mom saw the same on the news a few days ago. This leaves me very sad, Gabo has an incredible mind and wrote some of the most complex novels of the 20th century. It'd be a cruel irony if he started suffering from dementia.
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