Still Alice

by Lisa Genova

Sympathy is feeling for someone and keeps us emotionally detached, our experiences separate. Empathy is feeling with someone. It’s the imaginative leap we make when we take on the perspective of another person, when I imagine what it feels like to be you.

Stories give us the chance to feel what someone else is feeling, to walk in someone else’s shoes, to see ourselves in the other.

She remembered being six or seven and crying over the fates of the butterflies in her yard after learning that they lived for only a few days. Her mother had comforted her and told her not to be sad for the butterflies, that just because their lives were short didn’t mean they were tragic.

She wanted one more sabbatical year with John.

They talked about her as if she weren’t sitting in the wing chair, a few feet away. They talked about her, in front of her, as if she were deaf. They talked about her, in front of her, without including her, as if she had Alzheimer’s disease.

“My yesterdays are disappearing, and my tomorrows are uncertain, so what do I live for? I live for each day. I live in the moment.