On Pluto

by Greg O'Brien

  Siri, my droll personal assistant and the knowledge navigator for my indispensable iPhone 5, is getting into the act.

  Ask Siri, “Tell me a joke about Alzheimer’s?”

  “I can’t,” she often responds. “I forget the punch line.”

  ****

  Peter Falk never forgot a punch line. I always sought to emulate the rumpled Lieutenant Columbo. As a young investigative reporter for The Arizona Republic in the late 1970s, I modeled myself after the enigmatic Columbo—disheveled, wry, iconic, and exceeding expectations that had been intentionally lowered, yet always a city block ahead of others in his thinking.

  “Aahhhh, there’s just one more thing … There’s something that bothers me.”

  Early on in my marriage, I told my wife, Mary Catherine McGeorge (MC, as she is called today, given that the name is a mouthful or sounds like I married a nun), that all I had hoped to amount to in life was embodied, not in the riches of a lawyer, banker, or stock broker, but in the genius of Columbo—his meandering way of getting to the point, catching the detached off guard, breaking the story. Most women would have run for the hills, but MC bought into it—trench coat, spilled coffee, and ultimately, index finger to the frontal lobe.

  Be careful what you wish for. I’ve become Columbo—the wily investigator, the cross-examiner par excellence, the reporter in wrinkled khakis, the guy who retells his stories, the man with Alzheimer’s. Congratulations! What is Mary Catherine thinking now? God bless you, Peter Falk.

  When MC and I first met at the University of Arizona in Tucson in 1971, she was thinking she wanted little to do with me. No surprise there. I was a court-jester type and accustomed to such rebuffs; never took them personally, actually fed off them. A carpetbagger from the East, I was best friends and roommates with her brothers, Tommy and Louie, and I was always good for laughs, not bad in sports, got good grades, and generally easy on the eyes in a crowded, smoky college bar, but no matinee idol. MC, in contrast, was stunningly beautiful in a natural way—Jennifer Aniston-like. Still is.

  When she arrived in Tucson from California, guys lined up to date her, as if the Ark of the Covenant had been unearthed. Looking back, the queues were reminiscent of the conga line of headlights at the conclusion of the movie Field of Dreams. Tommy and Louie, on military orders from their father Ken, who was the spitting image of John Wayne, were sentries at the guard, protecting their little sister at all costs. I respected and admired Ken, yet mostly feared him terribly; he was a tall, broad, sturdy rancher, a member then of the Arizona sheriff’s posse, and a retired lieutenant colonel under General George Patton. Nobody messed with this guy. Nobody. While the bad dog in me wanted to date MC, the smart guy in me knew I didn’t have a chance. I’m a smart guy for the most part. Or used to be.

  So we became friends. Good friends in time. After graduation, when I was a cub reporter at The Cape Codder newspaper in Orleans, Mass., I spent some holidays with the McGeorges—all nine of them—in Bakersfield, Calif. MC and I had a common thread in journalism, her college major. She had the distinction of writing for the Tombstone Epitaph, which in 1882 chronicled Deputy U.S. Marshal Wyatt Earp’s shootout at the O.K. Corral in the “town too tough to die.”

  In June 1975, brother Louie came to the Cape for a visit. Little sister Mary Catherine tagged along. I showed them the country newsroom where I worked, the wide beaches of the Outer Cape with shifting sand dunes that rise to the skies, fresh, clear kettle pond remnants from the last great ice age, the great marshes of Wellfleet, the moors of Truro, and the eclectic vibe of Provincetown. Louie, one of my best friends, but a lightweight of a guy, was easily drained; his sister was full of verve. One night after a dinner of fresh cod landed on the Chatham docks, we were chatting it up late beside a fireplace, stoked with fresh cut oak, in the living room of my parents’ Eastham summer home where I lived alone. Louie dozed off early in typical fashion, then went to bed. MC and I continued to talk. At about 3:45 am there wasn’t much else to say, so intuitively, I reached over in the moment and kissed her. An innocent kiss, stretched as long as I thought proper. We laughed. I felt as though I had just kissed my kid sister. Bad dog!

  But I got over it, and asked her if she wanted to watch the sun rise over Nauset Beach in Orleans. We headed, hand-in-hand, out to my beat-up Triumph TR6 parked in the drive-way—top down, doors ajar, a rusted muffler, and drove to the beach. The night was ablaze in light, as if the Lord had flecked the heavens with a paintbrush of bright white. The rolling cadence of a gentle surf was soothing, and barefoot, you could almost count the grains of sand beneath us. On cue, at 4:52 am, rays of sunlight sprung from a horizon of deep, opaque blue and began to bleach the lower sky. As the sun slowly emerged from its slumber, we turned and kissed again. It was innocent, but it was love. You never forget real love.

  As we slowly walked back to the car, I was fully captivated by the moment, then whammo! It hit me. I began to think of Louie.

  Holy shit, I thought. How do I explain this?

  I had broken the code.

  Semper fi with the brothers and Ken no more. A court martial, death before a firing squad, a public hanging at the O.K. Corral, perhaps all of the above, awaited me.

  I didn’t want to show fear with Mary Catherine, so I kept the conversation to lighter issues and drove home in denial. As I was about to turn the corner down my dead-end street on Cestaro Way in Eastham, I could hear my muffler roaring. I gunned the engine like a NASCAR champion, popped the gear into neutral, then slowly and silently coasted to the driveway. Run silent, run deep.

  “Louie can’t know about this, not yet,” I finally told MC, as we kissed again.

  She agreed. Semper Fi.

  But I was in a panic about what John Wayne might think. Those daunting words from the classic movie Sands of Iwo Jima raced through my head, “Tomorrow we’re gonna take Iwo Jima, and some of you guys might not be coming back.” Frankly, I thought some friendly fire was in line from the brothers.

  MC and I promptly walked to our respective bedrooms, and within a half hour, Louie, an early rising farm boy, came to my door and promptly threw a pillow at my head.

  “Time to get up, asshole,” he said.

  “Ohhhhh, is it morning yet?” I replied after ten minutes of sleep.

  Hours later, Louie began to put the pieces together after MC and I fell asleep at the beach at 11 am.

  I made it back safely from Iwo Jima, and two years later, we were married in Bakersfield where MC’s folks lived then. Louie and Tommy were in the wedding party. And I was on decent terms with John Wayne, but in time, I was to have a geography lesson that I will never forget.

  Following the love of my life, I relocated from Cape Cod to Phoenix, to an investigative reporting job at The Arizona Republic, but my heart was for newspapering in the East. We returned three years later after I was hired as a political reporter at the Boston Herald American, turning down an opportunity for a reporting job with the LA Times in its newly created San Diego bureau, but after all, East is East and West is West. I’m a homeboy.

  MC was ambivalent about the relocation; while the romance to date was enticing, the thought of leaving close family was not. For most of our marriage, we have agreed on just about everything, from raising the kids to closely held beliefs, but on geography, we are planets apart. You say “aunt,” I say “ont.” In retrospect, neither of us is right; in fact, my wife now says “ont,” but you couldn’t fool her dad with a copy of Rand McNally.

  We spent our first Christmas after marriage with MC’s family in the majestic snow-country Pinetop mountains of northern Arizona. At a well-appointed, long, and narrow dinner table at a mountaintop lodge where whispers could be overheard, Louie and Tommy, after a few beers, played me like a harp with the old man.

  “So, Greg, when are you and MC moving back East?” they asked on cue.

  My father-in-law dropped his fork and stared at me, as if I had just burned down a convent full of nuns.

  “So, what’s this
all about?” he inquired.

  When you’re halfway across the river, you have two choices: retreat or forge forward. I chose to drown.

  “Well, Ken,” I said. “Many years ago, you took your bride Mary Ellen from Kansas City all the way to Arizona.”

  Without breaking a stride, he bellowed, “Yeah, but at least I kept her on this side of the Mississippi!”

  Silence. Deafening silence. No one dared speak to the Wizard of Oz; just follow the yellow brick road, I kept telling myself.

  I should have listened to Voltaire, who observed in the 1600s, “Behind every successful man stands … a surprised mother-in-law.”

  Over time, life for MC and me was blissful in the East for the most part, but life can change. Thirty-seven years of marriage, three children, careers, the ups and downs, and life altering moments are change agents.

  So is health.

  ****

  As you cross the Sagamore Bridge over the Cape Cod Canal, heading to the mainland, far from the Mississippi, the view to the starboard is startling in its natural beauty, its expanse of sapphire shoreline, and soul-searching mood for deep reflection. On an incoming ocean tide, the roiling waters of the canal spill out into Cape Cod Bay with the force of a rip, rushing to a horizon where water flushes up against the sky. At the crest of the bridge, with 135 feet of ship’s clearance below, you can see a swath of blue for miles, as it meanders up the coast toward Plymouth, “America’s Hometown.”

  The 17.4 mile canal—a part of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, a freighter bypass that connects Cape Cod Bay to the north with Buzzard’s Bay to the south—was the revelation of Pilgrim Miles Standish, who in 1623, explored this low lying stretch of land between the Manomet and Scusset rivers in search of a trading route that would forever isolate the Cape from the rest of Massachusetts, in both geography and in spirit.

  Negotiating the Sagamore Bridge and its sibling, the Bourne Bridge, is symbolic to the locals: a route on-Cape and off-Cape, a passageway to different states of mind. Coming or going, the bridge is always pause for reflection about what draws one so closely to this fragile spit of sand, a possession that began in me as a young boy in the early ’50s and has gripped me since.

  Heading off-Cape on Thursday, July 2, 2009 in my sun-bleached, yellow Jeep with Mary Catherine in the passenger seat was a particularly potent time of a weighing up of life—a moment, I considered, of fleeting independence as we made our way toward Plymouth to a life-altering appointment with a neurologist on referral, a specialist in the care of Alzheimer’s disease. I looked to the starboard from the peak of the bridge, as I usually do, but staring this time through the empty expression of my wife. Her focus, like a faithful mariner, was due north, just getting there. The morning was brilliant, on the lip of the ceremonial July 4th weekend, the ritual start of the Cape and Islands “season.” In less than 24-hours, miles of campers, SUVs, and Beamers would be queued up in traffic for a summer fix, but on this otherwise bracing day, all the buzz of the solstice was lost on me. Fixed in thought, a carousel of images of innocent days on pastoral Coast Guard Beach and Nauset Light Beach flashed through my head—images of raising our three children in a place far more a privilege than just a street address. I’ve always believed that on Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Martha’s Vineyard, we are privileged just to live here, but not privileged for being here. The place is far larger, more inspiring in the natural, than we. I thought, driving in my Jeep, about the promise of the past, the potential that I had once felt, and the resolve to persevere on a still dazzling, yet dead-end peninsula with one way on and one way off. My life at this point seemed to mirror this.

  As we negotiated the Sagamore to the realities of the mainland, I thought of recent roadblocks in my life, the unexpected detours on the day calendar. In so many ways, I had taken a privileged past, a presumptive future, and God-given talents all for granted. Like an enduring lobsterman in the fertile currents of Pleasant Bay, I had been pulling full pots all my life, loaded with an abundance of blessings, and now the pots were coming up empty. Over time, I had lost my bearing—adrift in unchartered waters in a place where I could once spot channel buoys by instinct. The realization was as chilling to me as the ocean current off Chatham in February. I had tried in the recent past to conceal the cold truth from others, to work the spin of distraction—the so called Wizard of Oz strategy, Pay no attention to the man behind the screen! I was always good at deflecting. But no longer; not with family, close friends, and some colleagues who have known me for years, and now had begun to realize that something might be terribly wrong. The curtain was drawn in Oz. There was no wizard.

  I began to think about the unsettling memory loss over the last few years: the loss of self and place; the piss-poor judgment; a wholesale loss of filter; the visual impairments; the incontinence, often after performing like a puppet genius before clients; the mental numbness; a complete loss of self-esteem; and the agitation of clinical depression that began as a boy. I thought about that horrifying dislocation months ago while Christmas shopping with my son, Conor, in a Providence mall, not knowing for a half hour where I was or who I was. I thought about a serious head injury years ago that doctors say likely accelerated earlier dementia symptoms, and about my recent diagnosis of prostate cancer—another medical hand-me-down from my parents. I thought about the rage I felt within.

  “So, what’s next?” my wife asked, as if I knew.

  I kept staring. We all deal differently with challenging times; not sure there is a correct way. Some exhale, some inhale, some just deflect and probe in more pragmatic ways. My wife is a goalie with her emotions. She can deflect, at least externally, the best slap shot drilled at her. It’s a survival mechanism that she has passed down to some of our children. But all those emotional pucks, all that vulcanized rubber of denial, mount up and never decay. They just sit there, consuming space.

  Mary Catherine was in the nets again this day.

  In the back seat, there were some answers, but not the kind built on hope.

  “Thanks for your kind referral of Mr. O’Brien,” Clinical Neuropsychologist Gerald Elovitz of The Memory Center wrote just days ago to my personal physician, Dr. Conant. “I know from him that you spent much time discussing his cognitive changes, and the test results here show that they are real.”

  Elovitz, who years earlier had diagnosed my late mother, Virginia Loretta (née Brown), with Alzheimer’s disease, went on to note, with reference to awaited test results of a brain SPECT scan, “I suspect an emerging frontotemporal dementia becoming more significant over the past 18 months and likely to progress … If there is no frontotemporal dementia, I would then suspect an early-onset Alzheimer’s-type dementia.”

  In a seven-page medical report, with terrifying cognitive test performance graphs, Elovitz described a person I would have never recognized, but yet had become—all results in analysis in the probable dementia range:

  “Mr. O’Brien is younger than 98 percent of the mean norm group age [for dementia], so his below average performance is very problematic … [His] results fell within the range of cognitive impairment … His seriously impaired score indicates a significant cognitive deficit in learning capacity for new information, and he needed cues on more than half of the test items to obtain the score … General function levels fell in the very poor general function consistent with dementia. Mr. O’Brien’s very high agitation level merits concern … The findings here reveal short-term memory function within the first-stage dementia range.”

  Some denouement, I thought. What a freakin’ loser I am! I had always been an A-brain guy, a good provider, a decent husband, a caring father, and beyond that, a high-functioning, creative mind. For me, it was never about the money; it was all about succeeding in life—paying the bills, taking care of family, and the process of intense thought, problem solving, and inspiration. The Jesuit logic, as my father used to say. Doctors, in follow-up medical reports, noted a “superior intelligence,” a nice shout out, I suppose, b
ut perhaps I could have done more with it. Shame on me for that, all the more, shame now that the dots were not connecting, a disconnect at intervals of alarming proportion. My prized possession was heading to a state of atrophy.

  Shit, this sucks!

  The pretext was over; strategies and disguises for overcompensating in recent years exposed. But I was aversely at peace with it. Someone was finally listening. Maybe I wasn’t alone, home alone. Mary Catherine, meanwhile, wobbly on her emotional skates, stood as firm as she could in the crease of the net, awaiting the next shot. Her head was in the game; protective mask down and no time for small talk.

  Elovitz had observed in his report, “I went over these [dementia] possibilities with both the patient and his wife, and he told me frankly, ‘I am not surprised,’ and seems relieved that we at least are addressing them head-on.”

  Head-on is the only way I’ve known since I slid down the birth canal. The prone position. The oldest boy in a family of ten, I learned early on, for example, that if you don’t grab for food, face-first, head-on at the dinner table, there will be nothing left. No one is going to feed you.

  ****

  My mother was never a great cook. A second-generation Irish American with close ties to County Wexford, she boiled everything gray. We used salt, pounds of it, as seasoning, and ketchup, poured liberally for supplemental flavoring, just to kill the taste. In the cluttered kitchen of our family home at 25 Brookdale Place in Rye, N.Y.—not far from the Upper East Side of Manhattan where my mother grew up—the pot roast simmered on Sundays from morning Mass until early evening. The hoary smell that wafted through the three-story stucco home still makes me nauseous today; I’m sure the scent still emanates from the walls. You had to cut the pot roast with a chainsaw.

  Mom used to call me a “lazy chewer,” but the meat was raw-hide-tough laced with fat. With all those mouths to feed, she knew how to stretch a dollar like it was Gumby.