Upstairs, the largest bedroom faced the street and seemed the perfect master bedroom. From the windows, we could see over the neighbors' roofs and on to downtown; City Hall, the Bay Bridge, the San Francisco Bay itself. I thought how wonderful to put our bed in this room and wake up each morning to the glittering city of San Francisco.
And so we did. We lasted maybe two nights.
The steep hill we lived on started several blocks down from us, so by the time a car reached the street in front of our house, it was deep down into first gear and struggling against an almost 45-degree incline, transmission grinding and engine at full throttle. All night long, we would be tossed awake by yet another mechanical assault on the top of the hill.
We finally retreated to the back bedroom, a space so small that we could just fit our queen sized bed with one side flush against the wall. That meant we had to climb onto the bed to get the covers straightened on that side. But it was quiet.
Good things happened in that bedroom. And in the morning the sun would pour in.
Downstairs, carefully detailed wooden molding ran along the ceiling in the living/dining area, cupids, flowers or such—a touch of art in an otherwise cardboard box of a house.
“I'm going to paint it,” Jan announced one day. “Pink and gold.”
Along the way, she added blue to the mix, working slowly and carefully, highlighting the different parts of the molding. For weeks, she climbed a ladder each day with tiny brushes and painted. She added elegance to the space.
“It's all about colors,” she explained to me, the person who did not study art history in college.
And “all about color” was why she painted the walls her favorite color … a pale pink.
“They use this color in mental institutions,” she explained one day, which caught me by surprise. “It helps calm people. Don't you feel calmer?”
Well, of course.
Nothing escaped our attention, not even the hardwood floors, which we had refinished and polished to a bright sheen.
So when our day was over and the fog poured down our street, we would sit on the sofa in our (calm) little house and light a fire. We dimmed the lights and opened a bottle of champagne because life was good, and another day together was more than enough reason for a celebration.
Jan got part time work at the local NBC-TV affiliate, as a reporter and occasional anchor. One day she did a story on an urban Boy Scout troop having a summer campout on the rooftop of a San Francisco skyscraper, and the next day I found myself doing exactly the same story for the CBS Evening News.
That was a good night by the fireplace.
We were the Darling-Darling couple, because that's what we called each other. At Christmas, our presents to each other would be “From Darling, To Darling.”
When I called and she heard my voice, it was always: “Darling!” She was always happy to hear from me, whether I was calling from somewhere else in the world where I was on assignment, or from the office to chat about dinner.
Her parents (mine were long since gone) teased us because we always kissed. “That will end when the honeymoon wears off,” they said confidently.
But it didn't.
I am the child of a rocky marriage and a mother who struggled with the twin demons of alcoholism and chronic depression so serious she needed electro-shock therapy. Her struggles made for a difficult childhood and made me shy, reticent, and often suspicious of the world. Not Jan. If we passed someone begging on the street, and she felt the person was truly in need, she gave money. If she had none, she would give me that look and I dug into my pockets and put money into the cup or glass or hat.
Jan developed her taste for exploring the world early because her father was a globe-trotting vice president for Boeing, selling jetliners in China and Singapore and across Asia. It seemed normal to her that Dad would be gone for weeks and come home from places that, once she learned about them, were worthy of her curiosity and fueled her desire to visit.
She was the oldest of five and grew up taking care of brothers and sisters. They all grew up in the same house that was forever being remodeled as they got bigger and their needs changed. Summers as a kid meant out the door in the morning to the pool or to play with friends and then race back for meals. College was the University of Washington across town.
While in college, she scrimped and saved so she could travel around Europe one summer with friends. She loved it. They had no itinerary—when they got tired of one place they would take a train to somewhere else. It was the kind of trip that only those open to adventure could experience.
Adventure and travel may have been part of my appeal to her. Our life together was always about me coming and going on stories, or us coming and going on trips.
We came together because of our sureness about being a couple. There was no anticipation of adventure outside of the good things that happened when we were together.
But adventure came calling and we couldn't wait to see what was coming next. But adventure is like a coin – it can have two sides, one good, one devastating. For us, it would be both.
Walking Into Oblivion: Stage Two
Individuals may feel as if they have memory lapses, especially in forgetting familiar words or names or the location of keys, eyeglasses or other everyday objects. But these problems are not evident during a medical examination or apparent to friends, family or co-workers. (Seven Stages of Alzheimer's Disease from www.alz.org, the Alzheimer's Association)
Most people think of Alzheimer's as a disease of the old. They have a story of a relative … a grandparent, a great aunt, a distant and aged uncle … whose elderly life in their seventies or nineties ended in the solitary desolation of this disease. But youth is no protection. The Disease can strike people in their twenties or thirties. And when it strikes early, it can be unusually ravenous, quick and vicious.
And researchers say that Early Onset seems to move faster toward death. “It's as if they have the more malignant form of Alzheimer's disease,” says Dr. Jeffrey Cummings, director of the UCLA Alzheimer's Disease Center. “It comes on earlier, and it lasts a shorter period of time, and leads to death sooner.”
As an example of ravenous, quick, and vicious, consider the story of Mark Priddy, the subject of an article in a London newspaper in July, 2009.
Mark was an ordinary guy, remembered for being “super fit.” When his symptoms began, he was initially diagnosed with depression. When he was thirty-three, doctors determined that he had Early Onset Alzheimer's Disease. Mark and Dione (his wife) had two daughters. By the age of forty, he could no longer speak, walk, or feed himself.
When I think of the clues strewn across our past that Jan had Alzheimer's, one of them was her fading ambition. She had always worked, from college onward and during most of the early years of our marriage. When we lived together in San Francisco from 1984 to 1986, she worked for the local NBC affiliate as reporter and fill-in anchor. It was the same when we moved overseas…and then it wasn't.
I never dreamed this had anything to do with Alzheimer's Disease. There was no reason early on to make that leap, and every reason as time went by to deny it.
And as time went by, denial was a much crafted, much practiced art for us both.
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“In Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One.”
~Yakov Smirnoff
If Someone Said Adventure, Count Jan In
In the spring of 1986, a year into our marriage, CBS News offered me the job as their Tokyo correspondent. The original assignment was supposed to last two years, but somehow we just kept going around the globe – from Tokyo to Moscow, then to London and back to Tokyo for a second posting.
It meant giving up our San Francisco house and lifestyle, and the comfort of living in a country where we could speak the language and understand the culture. But Jan embraced it as if this was exactly what she signed up for, and w
hen do we begin.
She had no doubts that we would be fine, would settle in and could figure out the rest as it came along. I said yes, based on her confidence and her sheer excitement for the unknown. I couldn't turn it down once Jan got excited. If she could make it work for both of us – and she was sure she could – the least I could do was agree and call the movers.
Jan loved Tokyo and its sense of the exotic East, but the next call to move on was not so good because Moscow was the capital of a culture she came to hate, despite that spirit of adventure. “The Russians feel sorry for themselves all the time.” It was said as much in sadness as simple observation. She believed strongly about creating good in your own life. I tried to gently remind her that we had a few more advantages than the average Russian.
“I don't know,” she insisted. “I think they just love being depressed.” She could never seem to comprehend why someone would choose “being depressed.” To her, life was about finding the good in each day and each experience, no matter how trying. But in Russia, people seemed on a centuries-long course of endless tragedy. It made for great, if agonizing, literature and extraordinary classical music. But the sense of gloom rubbed up against Jan's very nature. She believed that each person made their own happiness, and she believed that especially for the two of us. If we had chances to see or do new things, it was up to us to seize those moments and make them ours.
We had a kitchen large enough for an old wooden table and chairs suitable for breakfast and, on cold Russian winter nights, we would sit with a bowl of borscht and be happy for the warmth of the stove and the cooking. The rest of the rooms were big and simple … one for dining, another as a living room, and one large single bedroom. German prisoners of war had been used to construct the building, and it was solid, with some interior walls almost three feet thick.
Moscow was perfect for Jan's dinner-party organizing because most of us socialized in our homes. At that time the Soviet-era propagandists still touted Moscow as the glorious culmination of Communism. In fact, it was so inglorious that it had almost no functioning restaurants. By functioning, I mean the absolute bare minimum … clean and with safe, edible food. Instead, the food was badly, and sometimes barely, cooked. The cheese was dried and fly-stained because it had been left sitting out for hours, and the norm was service with a snarl. It was so bad that a business lunch would usually be a rendezvous at the American Embassy snack bar for a hamburger and a soda.
Case in point of how bad it was; one of the few hotels that catered only to foreigners had the city's only sushi restaurant, which was run by a Japanese company. But to be sure that the sushi was safe, we checked the schedule of the two Tokyo-to-Moscow flights each week and went to the restaurant the next day when the fish from Japan was fresh off the plane.
Another prime example of Moscow's culinary delights was the butcher's market around the corner from our apartment. Shoppers had to swat away the clouds of flies to get at the meat. Street vendors sold ice cream only in the worst of winter because they had no refrigeration, and the bitter cold was all that kept the ice cream frozen. Even so, we would not buy ice cream from them or any other dairy products from the grimy, dusty local stores that smelled of sour milk.
So we, as journalists, diplomats, and foreign business people, entertained in our apartments, where the food was safe despite the fact that our conversations were monitored by the KGB. Shopping was a trick, and Jan, true to her nature, mastered it quickly. To guarantee safe food, we had all our groceries shipped in from nearby Finland, using a store that, for years, had specialized in providing food and other necessities (toilet paper, new tires for the bureau cars, bath towels, diapers, ball point pens) to Moscow's foreigners like us.
Once a week Jan would take out pen and paper, go through their grocery catalog and prepare the food order, right down to meat and milk. About all we could trust to buy in Moscow was bread and sometimes cabbage for borscht when it was in season.
Armed with her list, Jan went up to the office for a session with the telex machine, basically a typewriter. It worked like a phone in that we could dial another telex anywhere in the world. These were the days before faxes, and in Moscow there were days when the phones could barely transmit a voice. The order was telexed off early in the week.
On Thursday, dozens of company drivers would head for the train station to pick up the boxes of imported groceries shipped in from Helsinki for their foreign bosses. If we were having people for dinner, the pre-planning was far more extensive. And if you forgot to order something, there was no place to run out to get it. It either came in from Finland on the once-a-week train shipment, or you did without, or you went sheepishly to a neighbor and borrowed what you forgot to order.
Inviting friends to our apartment fueled Jan's enthusiasm for cooking. Everyone, from our next-door neighbors coming for Saturday night dinner, to visiting dignitaries looking to connect with American journalists (and find an edible meal) were welcome at our table. Al Gore, then a Tennessee senator, was in Moscow on a trip investigating environmental issues, and a friend brought him around to our place for lunch. He confessed that he liked spicy food, which was also a huge favorite of Jan's.
She sliced some fresh Russian bread and pulled out a jar of what I considered to be insanely hot sauce, which was a kind of searing jelly concoction from a southern Soviet area. I thought the jelly might be strong enough to eat through the glass and certainly though the lining of the stomach. She knew it was a hit when the hot peppers made sweat pop out on Gore's forehead. They both had seconds.
Jan could just as easily plan and cook a formal dinner for twelve and loved the challenge. The rest of us would marvel at the result and, at the end of the evening we'd raise our glasses in a happy and noisy toast to Jan, the Chef.
Jan also brought her artistic touch to the flat, which was furnished. We could only bring clothes and a few paintings from Tokyo, so she picked out the most vibrant paintings, the ones with bright reds. And when we bought art work in Moscow to decorate, it was the same … splashes of color … as if the brightness of the flat inside could somehow neutralize Moscow's endless gray.
Our flat was bugged by the KGB, of course, and we had no choice but to live there since it was the company apartment assigned by the Soviet authorities. CBS News reporters and their families had lived there for decades. Each summer, the girls would come and spend two months with us, and we would befuddle the eavesdroppers by moving our bed into the dining room so the girls could have the bedroom.
And, within a night or two, we would hear the scraping, like a huge rat slowly creeping and crawling in the ceiling. “The idiots,” Jan would say, half-delighted with their lack of subtlety. They were, of course, moving the listening devices through the crawl space in the ceiling from the bedroom to the dining room where we had moved the bed in the summer so they could listen in on our pillow talk.
At the end of summer the girls left, and we moved back into the bedroom. “Here it comes,” Jan would say, all but laughing. And sure enough, the first or second night, we heard the scraping noises as they dragged the listening device from the dining room back to the bedroom. I can hear it, still. And when we talk about it, and when she remembers, it still makes her giggle.
Life could be tricky in Moscow, especially dealing with the authorities. We quickly learned that there were a lot of rules, mostly ignored, since the bureaucrats did what they wanted. Or sometimes, it seemed, they made up new rules, just for the occasion, and usually so they could say … nyet.
So we were nervous as we packed to leave Moscow for the next assignment in London. It meant direct dealings with the authorities, but Jan turned it into a total triumph. One of those dealings centered on getting our Soviet-era art out of Moscow, and it was one of her proudest moments. Each piece, including the few antiques we bought there, needed a special stamp from the Ministry of Culture approving it for export to make sure we weren't absconding with any state treasures. That meant a personal inspection visit from
Ministry officials before anything could be packed.
Jan researched it well and had gift bags ready for the two women inspectors who showed up. The important gift was American-made Marlboro cigarettes, practically a currency of its own in the desperate poverty that was Moscow in those days. This was the era where the Soviets had so little in their lives that people would get in line sometimes not even knowing what the line was for; only that something might be available in a shop. Foreign goods were rare and, in some cases, dangerous to have.
The ladies from the Ministry were not initially that friendly and had the grim heavy look that came from too many potatoes and loaves of bread, and too little meat, which was the typical Soviet diet washed down by the ever-present vodka. At first they were authoritative, bordering on rude, and in no mood to help us in any way. But Jan found something they, from such different upbringings and points of life, had in common … a shared passion for art. And these women, who were so unpleasant at first, soon warmed to Jan and her enthusiasm for beauty and its expression in paintings. We had some art books and Jan pulled several off the shelf, including my single favorite—a massive coffee table book of paintings by Edward Hopper. The women had never seen his works.
When I came home for dinner, I found all five-foot-two of Jan standing proud. She told me about the visit and said they had softened when she showed the women our art books, especially the collections of works by Hopper.
“Which,” I said, looking at the empty space in the shelf, “isn't there.”
“Nope. I gave it away.”
Now, this moment could have ended badly. “You gave it to them? My Hopper book?”
She smiled at me, rather self-satisfied, because she knew this story was going to end well. “Look,” she said, walking up to the first of our paintings. On the back, it had the stamp of approval for export. “See, here's another one.” She laughed. “I got everything approved!”
Jan's Story Page 3