It is a bit jarring, sort of like an out-of-body experience, to open up a copy of the newspaper for whom you work and see your own name in a headline on the obituary page.
I quickly realized that it was not my name. The headline labeled an obituary for my father.
My father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1994 at age 83, shortly after Ronald Reagan, who was the same age, was diagnosed with the disorder. Four years after his diagnosis, my father died–on April Fool’s Day, an irony which I am sure he would have appreciated bitterly, had he only known what was happening to him.
Dad’s name in that headline was a striking reminder to me of how much his name meant to him. He never hesitated to remind me that he owned it long before I came along. Our middle names were different, adding to the public’s confusion and assuring that I could never call myself “Junior,” even if I actually wanted to.
Dad’s middle name was “Hanable.” He was proud to boast that he was named after Hannibal, the great Carthaginian general. That acknowledgement would lead into a passionate description of how Hannibal rode his army across the Alps on elephants, through tremendous obstacles to defeat the Romans.
“Never say die, son,” Dad would say, summing up the moral of this epic tale. “Never be a quitter.”
Dad was so proud of this particular parable that I never had the heart to tell him that the spelling of his middle name was different from the way most people remembered the great Alps crosser. No problem. It was the lesson that counted.
Dad had no education beyond high school, but he was always teaching lessons. He was working hard, he said, so I wouldn’t have to work as hard as he did. With that, I could prepare to hear a lengthy description of how many jobs he used to work during the Depression–shining shoes, cleaning tables, mopping floors and delivering goods, all for about $8 a week, “which was good money in those days.”
I was proud of the old man, even though he wasn’t a doctor, executive or big-shot politician and couldn’t spell worth a darn. He pushed a broom in a paper mill. He pushed it for more than 40 years.
Years later I would be surprised to hear well-educated political activists and office seekers ridicule jobs like those my father worked. They called such work “dead-end” jobs. Dad saw such jobs as opportunities.
I guess he wasn’t educated enough to know a dead-end job when he saw one. For him, there was no dead end for work except death itself.
Most of Dad’s lessons came from the Bible and from his own past. When the horrors of Alzheimer’s took hold, memories from his past were all he had.
Fortunately for him, he didn’t know what was happening to him, my father’s doctor assured me. As the symptoms grew worse, I could see what the doctor meant. First the short-term memory goes. Then the longest-held memories follow. The disease works its way backwards, erasing memories until finally, after many months and years, the brain forgets how to eat and breathe.
In the interim, he lived in his past. When I would ask him, “How do you feel today?” he would respond with something like, “Fine, fine, I went out and played ball with my brothers.” His brothers all had preceded him in death. But, in his memories, which was where he had come to reside, they were as alive again as you or I.
A week before Dad died, about 500 members of the Alzheimer’s Association chapters nationwide came to Washington, D.C.. They came to ask Congress for a $100 million increase in funding for the National Institutes of Health to step up research on the disease.
The thought of skyrocketing Medicare costs as we Baby Boomers age into our senior years should be enough to make every taxpayer support Alzheimer’s research. The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that care for Alzheimer’s patients is almost 70 percent more expensive per capita annually than it is for other Medicare beneficiaries.
I won’t even try to sound objective about my support for such research. Those of us who have had Alzheimer’s victims in our families don’t need to imagine the burdens this disease can bring. We have experienced them.
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