At this stage of Alzheimer’s, many of the incidents brought on by the disease happen in the kitchen. Over the years, Judy had become a self-styled gourmet cook, the queen of the kitchen. Over the years, I had developed a real liking for barbecuing; when I retired, I began barbecuing our dinner’s main course most evenings on the patio. I grilled the meat; Judy prepared the side-order dishes in the kitchen—we were a team.
In July, the year after her diagnosis, I wanted to trim fat from chicken thighs and reached for my favorite go-to serrated long-bladed knife in the woodblock on the kitchen counter. No knife!
I turned to Judy. “Where’s my serrated knife?”
She gave me that familiar stare and then began looking for it. First, we searched easy places—counter tops, kitchen utensil drawers, and the island that separated the kitchen from the den. I pulled the stove and the refrigerator out from the wall, but no knife; we then searched the breakfast nook, the space between the kitchen and the patio sliding door—still no knife. I chose another go-to knife.
Months later, I couldn’t get the kitchen scissors into their woodblock slot; that slot was deep, and I couldn’t see what obstructed it. With the block in my right hand, I spread my left hand across the knife handles and upended it; out fell my serrated knife onto the kitchen floor.
My thought, Judy found my knife out of place and put it where she thought it belonged.
A few days after this knife incident, the house phone rang; I went to the kitchen to pick up, but the cradle on the kitchen counter was empty. I rushed to my office and took the call there.
I then searched the house for that phone but didn’t find it. In the washroom, I retrieved the spare phone from the top shelf in the cabinet above the dryer and put it in the kitchen cradle.
Months later, I picked up the hand-held vacuum cleaner from its box in our den coat closet and out fell the kitchen phone.
#
For Thanksgiving 2014, our daughter, Suzanne, who lived in Oklahoma City, came to spend the holidays with us armed with contact information for Tom whom she had met on a religious meet-up WEB site. While she was with us, Suzanne attended the same Protestant church service in McLean as Tom.
The night prior to her departure for Oklahoma, Suzanne sat on the wrap-around sofa for a talk with her mom and me. That conversation went something like this.
“I’m thinking about moving to Northern Virginia,” Suzanne said.
I couldn’t imagine Suzanne leaving her two grown children in Oklahoma City and moving to Virginia. “Why would you do that?” I asked.
“Well, you guys aren’t getting any younger,” she said.
This looked out of character for Suzanne. I once accused her of being a me-me type girl, which she vehemently denied. We’re the last reason Suzanne would be moving to Northern Virginia I thought.
“I’m going to put my house on the market and move here as soon as it sells. Can I stay with you guys while I’m looking for a job?”
Ahha, that’s what this conversation is about. She wants to move here to date Tom, but she needs a place to stay while she looks for a job. We hadn’t lived close to Suzanne since she went off to college more than thirty years earlier. Having my little girl temporarily living with us pleased me.
“You can stay with us for as long as you like,” I said.
That evening, when Suzanne was out on her final date with Tom, Judy and I were sitting in the den watching TV.
“Do you think Suzanne will be living with us from now on?” Judy asked.
“Are you kidding?” I said. “Suzanne won’t stay with us one day longer than she has to. Tom’s the reason she’s moving to Virginia; we’re just the excuse. She can’t go around telling her friends and people she works with that she’s moving to date someone special in Northern Virginia. I’m moving to be near my aging parents, sounds better. But she’ll be with us longer than she thinks because getting a job here will be difficult for her. She has two strikes against her. She had a fresh master’s degree in training but no real experience to back it up. And she works for a non-profit. Working for a nonprofit isn’t a strong credential in the profit-and-loss competitive world of Northern Virginia. The non-profit mindset is one hundred eighty degrees out of phase in this PNL scene. When I came across a resume from an applicant who worked for a non-profit, I trashed it. Besides, she’s got to sell her house, and that could take months.”
Having sold five homes in four different states, I had a feel for how long it could take to sell a house. Suzanne kept her home neat and clean, and it was beautiful but even so, I didn’t think it would be a quick sale.
Little did I know. When Suzanne put her house on the market, it sold in two weeks!
Shortly after New Years 2015, Tom went to Oklahoma City to help Suzanne and her two kids, Jeffrey and Alyssa, pack her out. Tom drove her “stuff” to Northern Virginia and into storage.
I learned two things from Suzanne’s relocation to Northern Virginia: a well-kept house in Oklahoma City can sell quickly and that Suzanne’s relationship with Tom was more than a passing fancy.
In February 2015, two years after her mom’s diagnosis, Suzanne joined us in Northern Virginia, and stayed with us for a year while conducting her job search. Finding a job at the salary she was looking for proved a challenge. Her non-profit current job and lack of experience in training didn’t command the salary she wanted.
While Suzanne was with us, I became paranoid that she would get herself killed. Suzanne was five foot, two inches tall, weighed about a hundred and twelve pounds, dressed chic, and didn’t look her age; in a word, she was beautiful. She began staying out late in the evening socializing with needy church friends. The incident of the young woman working for a congressman who had disappeared while jogging in D.C. was far too fresh in my mind—I could see that happening to Suzanne. If she felt I was being over-protective, she would have been right.
Suzanne finally took a job for a lower salary and married Tom in March of 2016. It wasn’t long before she quit her job and began working with her husband running a small business. Judy and I didn’t see much of them during that first years of marriage.
#
A month after Suzanne moved out of our house, I went to the driving range to work on my driver swing. As the clerk behind the desk handed me my bucket of golf balls, she told me, “Byron’s wife died this week. He looks like he could use a friend to talk to.”
Byron was my driving-range friend whose wife had Alzheimer’s. As I entered the shed, I found him seated under the heater. I pulled a chair up next to him.
“Kate died last week,” was his opening line.
“Did she die at home?”
“Yes. I took care of her to the end.” He sat listless, staring out into the empty field. “My son told me that caring for Kate was killing me. Wanted me to put her in assisted living or a nursing home. I visited a couple of those places to please him, but I couldn’t do that to my Kate. Not when she needed me the most. We’d been married for thirty-eight years.”
I nodded. I understood.
“Even when Kate didn’t know who I was, she wanted me to care for her. I could see it in her eyes.”
Byron named that same connection with his Kate that I had with Judy, a bond I felt was beyond the destructive reach of Alzheimer’s.
I had many questions I wanted to ask Byron. At what point did his wife recede into herself and not come back? Had she lost the faculty of speech before she died? Had she ever wandered? Had she died of Alzheimer’s or of something else? What were her last days like?
But I didn’t want to force him to relive those tough times.