Her name was Sharon. Few of us know her last name or each other’s for that matter, but that has never been important.
We meet most mornings dressed for combat, little or no makeup, hair uncombed in my case, and that’s why I love it there so much. It’s the neighborhood “Y” and if your shorts are too long or your outfit outdated, no one cares.
Few of us are close friends, we don’t call each other on a regular basis and it’s little more than a wave if we see each at the grocery store in town. And I’ve always kind of liked that too, in an anti-social sort of way. We come together for an hour each morning and then we scatter, no heavy conversations, no commitments.
Sharon always stood in the front left of our cardio and strength classes, always took a bike a little closer to the door in spin. I did not know how old she was exactly and for a long time, like everyone else, not much at all about her.
Then one day when we were standing around making small talk before class, she mentioned that she had read something I had written. And on another day she casually mentioned that her husband had been in the radio business (never bothering to tell me his professional name, which would have tipped me off seeing as he is a legend in Chicago broadcasting).
We talked more and more after that, before class, standing in the parking lot afterward. I told her about my children and she told me about hers and her grandchildren.
I’ve always admired the women older than me in our classes, sweating along with those in some cases 20 and 30 years younger. I’ll look at them and wonder if I’ll still be coming at their age, if I’ll still be capable of keeping up. They all look terrific but you can tell they are long past worrying about their abs or their thighs.
Part of the reason I don’t talk much at the “Y” is because I am such an awful morning person, stiff and sleepy and in no mood for chatter. But I think I’ve gotten better over the last few years since meeting Sharon. In fact, I probably bug people now, asking who has seen the latest “Biggest Loser” and other important questions.
And maybe I’m imagining it, but I’ve noticed much more of a community feeling around the place over the last few years. I stand around before class and in the parking lot after a lot now. I groan with the others in the middle of a particularly excruciating hour. I look for my pals and notice when one of the regulars is not there.
Whenever Sharon missed a week or two, I never thought much about it because she and her husband enjoyed some wonderful vacations and always filled me in when she returned. And then her good friend Peggy told us Sharon was sick, that it was leukemia.
I kept meaning to get her phone number, to do more than send a group card. But Peggy gave us updates every so often, enough that were optimistic that I went on my way after class, immersed in my life, sure I would see her soon, front row, left side.
And then I saw Peggy this week and she was crying. It wasn’t good. Sharon’s condition had been deteriorating rapidly.
She passed away on Wednesday.
And I realize there’s no such thing as casual acquaintances.
Not at our “Y,” anyway.
Blogs pause, but life rarely does.
How to catch up?
Homecoming dances and choir concerts, soccer tournaments and family visits, lots of work, a good thing. Balloon Boy, a bad thing. An evil germ this week that had me searching a website on “Common Cold vs. Swine Flu – How to Tell the Difference.”
An entire website inviting me to analyze my every symptom? I mean, what could be better? My family wouldn’t do it with me, which annoyed me greatly; my husband Rick’s response to my every sickness from runny nose to coma, “You’re fine.” But it would be fun for me, give me something to do to distract me from my suffering.
Fever is rare with a cold but usually present with flu, it told me. I reached 100.0 once in the middle of the night on the little plastic digital thermometer we were forced to buy when I dropped the good one and had the fire dept. out to scoop up the mercury (another day, another blog). So that’s pretty bad, and surely that cheap thermometer was wrong and I was much sicker.
Next I analyzed my cough – productive or non-productive? We’ll move on as even I did not wish to ponder this.
Aches – slight with cold, severe with flu. Moderate, I decided, and possibly due to my ‘Y’ class but I’m no doctor, they could have been severe.
I definitely had chills, which are flu-like. Sixty percent of people with chills have the flu, it read. Sixty percent, wow. I didn’t like my odds, I told my daughter, who ignored me.
Tiredness – mild with a cold, mild to severe with the flu. Come on. That’s a gimmee. Of course, I’m exhausted.
Headache, check. Rapid onset, check. Sore throat, check. Oh wait, that’s for a cold. Very confusing. Chest discomfort? If I coughed hard enough.
Turns out Rick was right, after one day of mild suffering and one day of major suffering, I was pretty darned close to fine, even I have to admit.
I’m thinking my resistance was low due to Homecoming, even though I didn’t actually go. But if you don’t think that watching your firstborn child get dressed up for her first formal dance, ask her date’s mother to pin a boutonniere on her son’s lapel, and then board a bus last used by strippers at a bachelor party is not heart-wrenching, you’ve never done it.
I admit up front that making fun of this is not unlike when journalists criticize “the media.” I was a willing participant in this extravaganza that would put most proms, wedding weekends and coronations to shame.
I’m pretty sure they went to the Homecoming Dance, although my nephew Daniel participated in his Homecoming festivities without actually going to Homecoming, which I’m told is quite common with upperclassmen too cool to participate in the very occasion they are celebrating.
Amanda, being a freshman, was not too cool. So she and the other girls dressed up – most transforming into 35-year-old women – put on very high heels that made me wince just to look at, and paired off with their dates, most of whom were fortunate enough to come up to the girls’ shoulders.
Then they took pictures (except for Rick and I because our camera was broken), went to dinner, to the dance, to the “after-dance activity,” where they ate again, to girls’ and boys’ sleepovers, where they snacked and visited each other’s houses because they had only been together the last eight hours, and then finally, had a lavish, 12-course breakfast, bringing the grand total of the weekend to the price of a medium-sized, used car.
Kidding. That would be inappropriate and lack all sense of common decency and perspective. It would probably be closer to a small, used car.
But Amanda was happy and after all, that’s the important thing. If your child is happy, you’re happy.
Even when you’re really sick with something that could very well have been a new strain of the flu and no one cares.
First week on Weight Watchers, lost 3.9 pounds and I’m thinking very seriously of applying to be their spokeswoman.
I mean, if Jared can do it for Subway . . .
I am not a diet person, I mean, other than being born female which naturally predisposes me toward such things. In my first 40 or so years of living, I was unfamiliar with all the various dieting options and never considered altering my normal dietary regimen, which encouraged regular servings of ice cream and the occasional Twinkie and Double Stuf Oreo.
But over the last few years, I have visited the other side, relapsed, re-visited and am now, officially, what I believe is referred to as a yo-yo dieter.
I’m not sure there is a clinical term for it, but I am the opposite of anorexic. That is, when I look in the mirror, I have the ability to stand at precisely the right angle so as to think I look pretty good and thinner than I actually am. But occasionally, I will notice subtle changes like my clothes no longer fit, and I feel forced to do something about it.
I tried Jenny Craig and lasted a week. No way can I eat freeze-dried and frozen food in a box and pretend it tastes normal . I tried Suzanne Somers’ plan, but in order to make that work, you have to either give up real sugar for life, or spend the day creating Baked Alaskas from one of her cookbooks with her secret non-sugar sugar, and there was no way either of these were happening.
If I understood the Zone diet, I’m sure I could give you a good reason why I don’t like that either.
As a child, my mother baked all kinds of wonderful desserts and at all times kept a full stock of Baskin-Robbins Rocky Road and chocolate chip ice cream as well as a stash of Milky Ways in the freezer. My dad liked his desserts monochromatic -- Sara Lee pound cake, Nilla wafers, vanilla ice cream – often combined into one big dessert.
In other words, sweets were not in any way forbidden, I had the metabolism of a housefly and yet I still allowed 18 years to go by without fully appreciating any of this. In fact, I rarely ate dessert at all, which , in addition to the metabolism, probably explains why I had to put rocks in the pockets of my jumper in first grade so that I could avoid embarrassment and hit the 30-point mark when Mrs. Bunce, the school nurse, wheeled the big scale into our classroom and announced our weights in front of everyone.
If that happened now, a class-action suit would surely be forthcoming.
Forty-plus years later, I am back to where I began, standing on a scale in a storefront of our local strip mall, only this time wishing it wasn’t illegal to be naked in full view of the Dominick’s parking lot. If one less layer of clothes guaranteed a better weigh-in, I dare say the place would be filled with naked women.
As it is, I kick off my running shoes, pull off my Nike Dri-Fit – which combined, weigh maybe 10 ounces – and step on the scale. I resist the urge to thrust my fist in the air.
I must say, I was not so confident going into the weigh-in, coming as it did the day after Yom Kippur. That’s because Jewish people traditionally observe the New Year by giving ourselves massive hunger headaches before gorging on bagels, lox and Aunt Elsie’s chocolate coffee cake.
I looked up Aunt Elsie’s coffee cake in my new Weight Watchers Complete Food Companion, but the closest thing I could find was worth more points than I am allotted in a day.
So maybe I would have done even better in my first official week on my new regimen if, you know, I had tried even harder on Yom Kippur, maybe fasted past 2:30 in the afternoon and had a little less generous piece of coffee cake.
But I’m also thinking, hey, 3.9 pounds including the bagel and coffee cake. This diet isn’t half-bad. Next week, I may have to work it in again. Atoning for my sins is working out nicely
Finished my class. Caught up with Michael Jordan’s Hall of Fame speech. Taped the Emmy’s, which I’ll never watch. Joining Weight Watchers tomorrow (are you required to tell them that you plan to stick around only until your pants aren’t so uncomfortable? Is there a special membership plan for this?)
Of course, now I need to carve out an extra 10 to 12 hours a week for the new season of “Dancing with the Stars,” which could be a problem, but I can fast forward through at least eight of those hours, so I think I’m OK.
I am back in blog land because without my touchstone, I feel like I have been dreaming this last week. Weeks?
At some point during this time, I also gave a library talk on my book, “Sweet Lou – Lou Piniella, A Life in Baseball,” which, if you enter my website in the conventional manner, you have been assaulted with for the last five months. This was my plan. But ever since Piniella’s Chicago Cubs have been out of the pennant race (I believe sometime in mid-June), the talks have, well, lacked a certain punch.
The book is about Piniella’s life, a biography, and as such it should not be important that he has bombed with his latest team or that most Cubs’ fans would like to see him on the next bus to St. Pete. But because he happens to be wearing Cubbie blue on the cover, I get the distinct feeling that Lou, sweet or otherwise, is not necessarily a person of great interest.
For my next book project, I am thinking of perhaps something on the cast of “Dancing with the Stars,” as I believe this would be truly timeless.
In the meantime, I want to call back every radio show, acquaintance and anyone else with whom I have chit-chatted about Michael Jordan over the last few weeks and take back what I said.
For those of you who may be unaware, Jordan has been roundly and almost unanimously eviscerated for his recent induction speech at the Basketball Hall of Fame. People are not supposed to be criticized for their Hall of Fame induction speeches. This is like being booed while doing a eulogy. This was supposed to be a festive moment in which Jordan joined his other inductees, thanked everyone from his kindergarten teacher to the Bulls equipment manager (Johnny Ligmanowski, a really nice guy) and, if all went according to plan, cried while doing it.
Jordan did cry. This was the best part, according to most. I only saw the last few minutes live, which included a very nice, sentimental little passage that sounded like he took it from a collection of old athletic proverbs about limits, like fear, often being an illusion.
I liked that part, don’t get me wrong. But if he wrote those words himself, then I was the ghostwriter for all seven Harry Potter books.
The rest he wrote himself. And after reading bits and pieces and then passively agreeing with most that Jordan was inappropriate in his comments, I have now seen a tape of the speech in his entirety and I officially take it back.
It was neither inappropriate nor mean-spirited nor worthy any of the other silly critiques people have given it.
I covered Jordan and the Bulls throughout the 1990s and traveled with them as the Tribune’s beat writer during their early championship years. I liked Michael, but I do not pretend to be his friend nor to know him as, say, a psychoanalyst would.
What I do know is that the speech was quintessential Jordan. It was also as sincere as any of the speeches that night and not even close to him trying to be nasty. I’m not going to repeat everything he said. If you’re interested and haven’t heard it, there are about five million copies on U-Tube to replay.
I doubt most people really listened to it – the way he said what he said, exactly what he said. It was genuine and from the heart. It probably did require a passing familiarity with the man to appreciate it and for that, it might have been worth getting someone to at least proof it.
But he is a public figure, open to our probing and to our criticism, even for a Hall of Fame induction speech. It is the price he must pay. He knows this better than anyone. I’m just glad on this night anyway, he didn’t seem to care.
It’s the first day of the NFL season, I’m in Green Bay for the Bears’ opener, and I am thinking of my dad.
It is nearly 80 degrees today, which would have made him very happy. I can’t remember ever going to a Bears game with my father when it was warmer than 34. And that was in September.
If you drew up a list of the top three things my father hated, the cold would have ranked somewhere between getting wet with his clothes on and Nazi Germany. That said, he loved the Bears and was a season-ticket holder for over 40 years.
I would go with him and my brothers often, almost every game with my brothers for many years during my childhood, and watching my dad shiver and curse at the cold was more fun than the game (particularly with the Bears teams we were watching).
Bundled up in longjohns, as he would call them, he would drink hot chocolate and sometimes a little something extra slipped in, and then lose his body heat sometime in the middle of the first quarter.
We would watch the Bears’ angry round coach Abe Gibron stalk the sideline and their quarterback Bobby Douglass throw missiles off the hands of his receivers. And then, in 1975, a young running back from Jackson, Miss., named Walter Payton was recruited by the Bears and watching my father shiver lost all its appeal.
Eventually my dad would run out of patience and circulation needed to watch Bears’ games in person but football season never lost its appeal.
My brother Barry’s mood for the entire week was predicated on what the Bears did each Sunday. My dad would watch on one TV with whoever wanted to join him, and my mom would watch on another, unable to tolerate my father’s pessimism.
Typically, as soon as the Bears lost the lead, he’d proclaim, “Well, that’s it.”
He was not basing this on any deep football analysis but more like a succession of losing seasons. My mother had another interesting way of watching games, which was to run out of the room whenever the game was possibly nearing a dramatic conclusion.
This is where I came in handy, offering play-by-play updates to my mother in the bathroom or kitchen or wherever it was she took refuge.
And you wonder why I’m a touch neurotic.
Today when I left my house to drive to Green Bay, my son Alec asked me who I picked to win the game tonight, and I told him the Packers.
“Thank you,” he said dramatically. “You’re always wrong. No offense.”
None taken, of course. Picking against the Bears comes naturally to me. When I was younger and closer to my life as a fan, these media predictions that were required of me really threw me. If I picked the Bears to win and they lost, I was fairly convinced that I was the reason. So I sub-consciously and superstitiously took the opposite tact and picked against them whenever I was unsure.
And to think fans might have taken these predictions seriously.
No offense taken.
For homework in my Visual Storytelling class this weekend, I had to shoot and edit a 30-second video sequence. Took me, oh, about 15 hours.
I know my husband Rick is reading this right now and going, “Uh, excuse me, it took you 15 hours?”
OK, so he helped. But I should point out that it still took 15 hours.
It is my belief that every family has at least one person (him) who knows how to handle all the photo- and video-taking duties (but is frankly a little overconfident). And there is one person (me) who is not allowed to go near the camera or video recorder.
As a result, whenever I am occasionally forced to photograph anything – still or otherwise – a Dramamine is required before viewing. I must admit I even make myself sick with the blurring and jiggling and then, as an added bonus, the video will apparently be over and viewers will be treated to a shot of my shoes as I walk around, talk to people, and maybe put the camera down someplace where the battery can die a peaceful death only to be discovered 15 minutes before some child’s graduation is scheduled to begin.
It’s not that I can’t appreciate the many benefits of having quality photos and videos in my life. We just don’t happen to have any.
I am always a little in awe of those people whose houses you walk into and are treated to 25-by-30-feet black and white stills of their children walking barefoot on the beach. I wish I had one of those houses and yes, I realize those photos are professionally taken, but those are also the people with a full library of their children walking barefoot on the beach that they shot themselves.
Rick and I typically accuse each other of purposely forgetting the camera at important events because neither one of us have the patience to take pictures or video.
Oh sure, when the kids were babies, we took the requisite 50 photos of them spitting out their first solid food. But soon, their birthday parties were captured with maybe 10 pictures (of other kids, not ours) and there was no video (because the battery was dead).
My sister-in-law Jodi is one of those people who videotapes an hour and a half straight of her daughter’s violin recital and takes 20 pictures of the food on the Thanksgiving table. Holidays and vacations ceased being holidays and vacations with Jodi and instead became “the week I spent taking pictures in Florida.”
Somewhere between this and us is normal, I am sure.
Part of the reason I am not motivated to be a good photographer, I think, is because I am a terrible subject. I’m the one who makes everyone around me miserable trying to keep me out of pictures because I have bad hair or am sunburned.
One day, my great grandchildren are going to think their great grandmother, who was born in 1961, came from the old country because there will be no photographic evidence that I exist.
One year, Rick decided to make a project out of putting photos in albums (for those of you under the age of 35, these are books with sticky pages covered with clear plastic sheets that cover photographs). He actually did a good job (though he probably could have tossed the doubles of blurry pictures of kids with food on their faces) and we congratulated ourselves on our nice little photo library.
But then Amanda entered school and each year had to dig up old family pictures for one project or another, and so much for our nice photo library.
Now we are a modern family with all of our photos taken digitally and stored in our computer.
You can come over and see all 12 of them any time.
I’d like to go on record as saying I love the Duggar’s.
I don’t think it will surprise anyone who has ever met me or read me that I have, on more than one occasion, tuned into their documentary TV series, "18 Kids and Counting" and like it. And every time they have a new baby, which occurs more often than I clean out my refrigerator, I eagerly read all about it and try to anticipate the baby’s name.
It’s not as hard as you might think if all you know about the Duggar’s is that they’re the family with 18 kids, soon 19, because all of the children’s names begin with the letter “J.”
Not to brag, but by age 11, our daughter Amanda had memorized the names of every member of the Duggar family. Her father and I were quite proud. Even with the demands of junior high, she kept up with each new child.
Even – and this is really impressive -- when they appeared to run out of standard “J” names like Joshua and Jill and James and hit a streak of Josiah, Joy-Anna, Jedidiah and Jeremiah.
I am totally serious when I say this. If I had 19 children – heck, I’ll go so far as to even say 12 – I absolutely could not remember all of their names. And when I say I could not remember, I don’t mean that I’d mistakenly call one child another child’s name. I do that now and I have two kids. No, I mean that I would forget several of my own children’s names and maybe even what they looked like and that I had them.
And so I marvel, I’m sure along with thousands, maybe even millions of other mothers around the country, at Michelle and Jim Bob and how they manage to keep it together.
Still, I have wondered as Jon and Kate have been dragged through the underbelly of journalism’s underbelly, and the Octamom has been relegated to freak status, how the Duggar’s have remained unscathed.
But even as I wondered, I knew. While Jon is gallivanting all over the world with much younger girlfriends before the divorce from the mother of his eight children is final, Michelle and Jim Bob are possibly the cutest couple I have ever seen.
I mean, watch the show sometimes. They actually look like they like each other (and no, that is not necessarily a requirement in making 18 children. Once again, re: Jon and Kate Plus Eight).
As for the Octamom, Nadya Suleman really didn’t need to call Katherine Jackson as she did recently to ask if she could come to Michael’s burial because she considered herself to be his “soulmate,” in order for us to question her judgment. That was just a bonus.
According to Bill Zwecker’s column in the Chicago Sun-Times, Suleman reportedly told Jackson’s mother that going to the funeral would provide her with closure. No word on whether using in-vitro fertilization to add eight babies to six others while unemployed, receiving public assistance with without a partner to help, has given her closure on parenting.
As for the Duggar’s, I am not passing judgment on anything they do, or – in the case of birth control -- don’t do. From all appearances and camera angles, all the children seem remarkably happy and exceptionally well-groomed. They all play musical instruments – though I have noticed no drums or tubas are included in the family band (cowards) – and they all help with various chores around the house (I believe the infants, however, are exempt from this rule).
They make their own clothes and are home-schooled, which, in the eyes of many and, OK, me until I educated myself, characterizes them as something akin to cult status.
They are, in fact, Southern Baptist. Both parents have their real estate licenses. Jim Bob served two terms in the Arkansas House of Representatives and was a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2002. They say they built their 7,000-square foot home by themselves and live off income made by renting commercial property they own debt-free.
When they were married, Michelle at 17 and Jim Bob at 19, Michelle took birth control pills. Four years later, they decided to start their family and had their first child. Michelle then went back on the Pill, became pregnant and miscarried.
On their website, they say that after reading of the side effects caused when conceiving while on birth control, they believed “their selfish actions had taken the life of their child” and they prayed for God to teach them to love children as He did. Right after that, Michelle became pregnant with twins and they have not questioned anything that has happened since.
So why should we?
If I didn't think I would lose all credibility as a responsible parent, I might have rousted my children from their beds last night and asked them to help me with my homework.
As it was, I seriously considered it.
I am a student again. For three days now, 12 hours in all, and I can say with certainty that I don’t remember ever concentrating so hard when I was an actual college student. I also don’t remember ever being so hungry in school.
I am currently taking a faculty class in preparation for teaching the type of multi-media techniques and technology now required of journalism students. Though I am pleased to report that I am picking up new skills and knowledge in “visual storytelling,” as the course is called, I am also quite confident that any students I may have in the future, possessed more technical ability when they were toddlers than I do now.
It’s the same with every generation. My parents marveled at my aptitude in operating a microwave oven; I watch my kids download their iPods and think they’re geniuses. My nephew Daniel is 16 and if he printed up a few business cards could quit school tomorrow and support the entire family by charging for the kind of video montages that put the pros to shame.
Like me heating up Stouffer’s Lean Cuisines all those years ago, it simply comes naturally to kids to perform complex computer tricks. When our son Alec was two, he once toddled up to our computer, logged onto the Internet and was e-mailing Japan when we walked in.
OK, just kidding about Japan. But he was doing something neither his father nor I understood.
But the computer part is really only a fraction of the adjustment I have been undergoing this week.
Apparently, since I graduated from college, students are now allowed and even encouraged to eat in class. And not just eat. In my class which, remember, is for faculty, eating is part of the curriculum. For those of you in the Chicago area, I’ve seen less food at Ravinia. All that’s missing are tablecloths and candlesticks. I’m waiting for the wine.
Today, we had a delightful spread of Cheezits, pretzels and cookies. I saw people with full meals. Salads, sandwiches, fruit, mysterious packages wrapped in aluminum foil and a wide assortment of breakfast bars.
As for me, I was hoarding peanuts, a banana and two strawberry Nutri-grain bars in my purse. I didn’t know it was family style.
On the first day, I brought nothing and couldn’t have been more humiliated. After class, I headed straight to Dominick’s to stock up on supplies for the next day. I am currently planning for next week’s classes and thinking hummus and pita chips, perhaps a nice fondue.
Am I the only one who remembers when gum was discouraged?
When I asked one of my classmates about this practice of chowing down in the classroom, she looked at me as if I was hauling around an electric typewriter and a hotpot. Evidently, students today cannot possibly be expected to make it through a three-hour class without nourishment. Our class is four hours long and I am currently still on our five-minute break.
I tried explaining this to my husband Rick with a certain righteousness about the whole thing, when he quietly pointed out that there are cultures all over the world in which people survive and even thrive for four hours at a time without snacks.
Hopefully, I will learn a lot from this course. I already feel smarter. And maybe by the time I face my first class next quarter, I will be able to button my pants again.
I had to look up her picture in our high school yearbook.
I remembered her name but had to remind myself what she looked like. I don’t think we were ever in the same classes, though maybe in grade school.
Not that I wasn’t happy to hear from her.
Since my 30th high school reunion, mostly through the power of Facebook, I had been in touch with several former classmates, some I had seen at the reunion, some who weren’t able to make it.
Merle wrote to me after my blog on the reunion, joking that she was sorry she missed the mysterious guy in the burgundy sport coat whom I had written about. I don’t know how she had found me. I only know what connects us now.
I called up her second e-mail as I stood on the corner one morning last week, waiting to meet up with a friend and go walking. When I saw the word “Alzheimers” in the subject line, it did not particularly shock me.
I hope it doesn’t sound pompous when I say that I don’t think a single week has gone by since I wrote about my family’s experience with Alzheimer’s in the Tribune Sunday Magazine a year and a half ago, that I haven’t heard from someone about it.
At first, the response was shocking – both in volume and in the depth of emotion. In some cases, I had friends and colleagues who were going through much the same thing my family and I were going through and yet we had never talked about it, never knew. But I was just as touched by total strangers who wrote or approached me, and who continue to do so, saying they read the story, that they remembered it or that they related to it somehow.
When I called up Merle’s e-mail while standing on the corner last week, the words, sadly, were not unfamiliar. And so, as I always do, I kept reading:
Dear Missy,
My father just died from dementia this summer. We didn’t go to the reunion, because we couldn’t afford to go back to Chicago again after the funeral tapped us out. I am married to xxxx. from high school, we have two children and we live in [California].
More to the point, my father was diagnosed in 2000 with Alzheimer’s. At first he lost his short-term memory and our lives were like the movie, “Ground Hog Day.” Every three minutes we would have the exact same conversation.
“Dad, you have a doctor’s appointment in an hour, you have to get ready.”
“You didn’t tell me about the doctor’s appointment, what doctor?”
“Doctor Green.”
“Who is Doctor Green? He is not my doctor, I am not going.” (repeat for the next half hour)
The good part was that because my father could not remember, we just would make up answers until he would respond and do what we needed him to do. He was angry, suspicious, and I assume – terrified. He knew he was literally losing his mind. I think in some ways the beginning of the disease was about the hardest, because of the anger and the personality change.
My mother died in 2001 and my father really deteriorated at that point. We had moved my parents out to California in 2000 because they were both so sick and we needed to take care of them. From 2000 to 2009, my father lived on his own with a caregiver who came in during the afternoons and evenings. He never left his home, never tried to cook, and seemed to be safe on his own.
He slowly forgot our names, our ages, his name, his age, his profession, and everything about his past life. His personality totally changed. He went from being the most gentle and most polite person I knew, to a person who was rude and threatening with strangers. He went from a man who was obsessed with diet and exercise to a man who ate junk food and refused to leave his home. But, he was always loving and kind to his family and his grandchildren (even though he did not know their names).
Education was always very important to my father. He was always embarrassed that he was the only member of our family with only a baccalaureate degree. Two years ago he asked me if he was in first grade. I told him that he had been in first grade 81 years earlier and that he was an accountant. He seemed very happy for a minute or two, until he forgot and asked me again. The only thing that my father remembered was that my siblings and I were very important to him and that he loved us. When I would come over, he would often tell the caregiver that she could leave, because I was there. He would sit with me and hold my hand while watching television. He would hit strangers.
One morning this past May, my father refused to get out of bed and to eat or drink. We took him to the hospital and were told that it was end-stage Alzheimer’s and that his brain had lost the ability to feel hunger or thirst. We took him home to die and it was brutal. He literally starved himself to death. When we tried to feed him or give him something to drink, he would spit out the food or water, he couldn’t swallow and did not know how to eat. He also went blind. A friend of mine is a neuropsychologist and she told me that the parts of the brain that control appetite and thirst are close to one of the vision centers and that it made sense to her that he would lose his vision at the same time. However, even in the last few days before he died, he would pull me, my brother and sister toward him in bed and hug and kiss us.
He couldn’t stand, talk, or really move, but he still knew who we were and he was saying good-bye. When he died, my sister and I were lying beside him in bed and holding his hands, and his caregiver (who had taken care of him for seven and a half years) was holding his feet. He just stopped breathing.
When the dementia got severe, I felt like not only was my father dying, but that my childhood was dying with him. A part of my childhood was also going, because those memories of me were gone. The mourning process has been more difficult than I expected. I have had to take care of my father for the past nine years and suddenly that responsibility is gone. I miss going over to his house and seeing him sitting on the couch, watching television, and eating candy and potato chips. I miss seeing his face light up when I walked in into the room. Even with this horrible disease he was always my father and I will always miss him.
I am sorry that you are going through this too.
Merle
I’m not sure why this one letter from this one old friend affected me the way that it did. Maybe because her words were so spare, her feelings so raw. Maybe it was because I happened to get her e-mail in the days following the two-year anniversary of my mom’s death. Or maybe, more likely, because as she described her final days with her father, I could not help but think of our final days with mine.
All I know is that the tears came when I least expected them, standing on a corner, alone with my Blackberry, connected to someone I barely remembered. And that they came hard.
With her permission, I am going to post Merle’s letter on the Alzheimer’s page of my website with hope that it will encourage others to tell their stories. Not to make each other sad, but to feel connected. She said it was cathartic writing about her dad, that she felt a little less isolated.
That’s how it works.
Most of what I pretend to know in life can be traced to a sitcom. If it isn’t Seinfeld, it’s Mary Tyler Moore. If it isn’t Sex in the City, it’s The Brady Bunch.
That’s probably why, when my daughter came home from her first day of high school today and listened wistfully to her brother talking about his first day in junior high, I thought of the Brady Bunch episode when Marcia pretended she was sick on her first day of high school.
Frankly, I was surprised Carol and Mike fell for this but of course, Carol called the doctor, who of course made a house call and diagnosed, with a hearty chuckle, first-day-of-school-itis. You could hardly blame Marcia. A big wheel in junior high, she was now attending a high school where apparently she was the only student from her entire district and thus knew no one.
I’d be sick, too.
When her parents made her go the next day, her brother Greg said he’d introduce her to his cool, football player friends who all looked 35, right down to the receding hairlines. But Marcia was suitably impressed and trying too hard to be mature, she embarrassed Greg by telling one of his friends that she looked forward to the “intellectual stimulation” of high school.
(Note: While I am embarrassed that I remember this right down to the exact dialogue, I am also secretly proud and would be willing to bet big money that I am right.)
Anyway, Greg comes home humiliated at his wacky sister’s behavior – or maybe it’s her bell bottoms. Kidding, of course. Marcia was wearing a tasteful skirt and pumps. And he urges her to be herself, which she agrees to do, going back the following day and signing up for all eight clubs in the school until she finally tells her parents she has to be herself, so she’s sticking with the rugby club. Kidding again. She drops everything but ceramics as I recall.
I’ll have to remember to ask Amanda if her high school has a ceramics club and tell her to check the bulletin board.
You would have thought Greg would’ve been a little more patient with his sister, given his first day of high school a couple seasons earlier resulted in him demanding that his father give up his den and make it into a mod bachelor pad. Greg, too, was trying to be too mature, translating to his outfit of fringed vest, headband and shades, and he, too, was laughed off campus.
I find these stories to be instructive and am sure my kids will take some important lessons from them as they transition to their new schools.
And in the absence of a sitcom, I can always reflect on my own childhood, which often was funnier than The Brady Bunch.
Aside from the kid on the kindergarten bus who threw up out the window, I remember one other first day -- coincidently my first day of high school -- when I called my good friend Bari the night before to ask what she was going to wear.
This was of critical importance because designer jeans were just coming into vogue and it would be a little daring to wear them on the first day of school when all of our mothers would be horrified that we weren’t more dressed up. Bari assured me that the jeans would be saved for the second day of school, so I wore my powder-blue polyester pants with the narrow glittery belt and shimmery polyester blouse with the seascape design. Stunning, huh?
Except that Bari, in an apparent last-minute conference call with every girl from our junior high, elected to go with the Gloria Vanderbilt’s, thus leaving me humiliated. Really needed texting.
Despite all of this, I stuck with Bari the following day and when it was time to find our bus home, I decided that I would wait for her, even though she had a tenth-period class and I was finished after ninth. It was either that or board the wrong bus and end up having dinner in Morton Grove (not my suburb).
Trying to be casual, I passed by her class to make sure she was there and that I wouldn’t miss her when she came out. Then, with nothing else to do and still concerned I might miss her, I passed by her class again. Over the next 50 minutes, I would circle the first floor of the school and pass by the open door of her classroom approximately 43 more times until every kid as well as the teacher became acutely aware of me and giggled every time I walked by (naturally, I did not know this until Bari came out afterward and told me).
I am thinking that if my children are at all anxious over these next few days and weeks that these stories might calm their nerves and let them know that we’ve all been there and that eventually we all adjust and move on.
And maybe if they’re lucky, they won’t remember it in vivid detail 35 years from now.