Sister Mary

Yesterday my great aunt died. Her brain is being sent to a lab.

She was a Catholic nun of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, Boston Irish, and sharp as a tack into her 90s. She had a prayer for everyone each day. I remember her on a Maine beach, wearing a sun hat, and already impossibly old, but with a sparkle in her eye, watching my daughter play in the cold summer waves.

Why is she being studied by scientists? Because the rate of Alzheimer’s disease is so suspiciously lower among nuns that my great aunt was included in a multi-year study made by neurologists to try figure out the reason. This 'Sister study' was even featured on an ABC 20/20 news program a couple of years ago.

The nuns would explain this in terms of their relationship with God. There may be a scientific angle too; prayer, as a practice, does focus the mind. Or perhaps nuns, many of them educators, keep using their cognitive abilities long into old age.

Aside from all of that, it will be a bittersweet Thanksgiving. But the whole family will be together, and there might be a great Irish wake.