“I feel like it forced you out of yourself, Daddy,” says Rachel. “I teased you, ‘Now I know what’s going on in that pea brain of yours.’ You finally felt like you needed to communicate with us, and that was a change I really appreciated.”
Says David: “Daddy, your shift was like this—before, you had always sent my allowance check to school without a note. Then after Mommie’s news broke, I started to get this epistle every three months or so, sharing what you were thinking.”
Our daughter and son were describing how I was changing after Martha was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Their mother always was the talker in our family—until she could talk no more.
I wasn’t sure why Martha and I were driving 800 miles to meet with a nun we’d never heard of. Our friend Rev. Lacy Harwell encouraged us to, so we went. Even he had no idea what would come from our visit with Sister Elaine Prevallet.
All he said about her was, “I’ve never met anyone with her gift of discernment.” He did add that he’d encouraged other friends to visit her too, especially those facing a serious crisis.
Martha had just turned 50 when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1997, and I was 52. We had a son and daughter in college and a daughter still in high school. I was an entrepreneur running the regional business magazine I’d started 13 years earlier. Martha was actively involved in civic and political activities, such as chairing our county’s Juvenile Welfare Board and serving on the St. Petersburg city council a few years earlier. The year before her diagnosis, she’d run a hard-fought campaign for a Florida legislative seat, losing the primary by 20 votes.
With the pressures of work, family, and finances, we hardly had a moment to breathe. Or sleep … what’s that?
Flannery O’Connor, that cantankerously brilliant writer from Georgia, is reported to have said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.”
That’s me! I thought when I first saw this. I feel … odd! It was a peculiar twist on John 8:32 (“…and the truth shall make you free.”)
Not long after Martha’s diagnosis, I began to search far and wide for any hint of how we might get out of this thing called Alzheimer’s. I looked into alternative medicines and into alternative spiritual practices.
“We’re all on a journey.” You’ve heard that expression, I’m sure. I never gave it much thought, though. It was for me a bland cliché without bite or taste.
That is, until my wife and I hit the wall with her diagnosis of Alzheimer’s in 1997. But even then I didn’t recognize that we were on some kind of “path.” All we wanted was to wake up from this nightmare and be told it wasn’t true. I didn’t want to know that we were “on a journey.”
I thought I knew what fear was. Turns out I didn’t know the difference between a common fear and a nightmarish one until I was 52 years old. That’s when my wife Martha was told she “may” have Alzheimer’s disease. I say “may” because this disease can’t truly be diagnosed except by autopsy. So there we were, as I describe in my forthcoming book A Path Revealed—looking into an unknown future with no solutions.
After that jolt, I thought nothing else could shock me. But almost two years later I was forced to take Martha’s car keys away. As she stormed upstairs crying, I cried to myself, I didn’t just take her keys away—I cut her heart out.