by Greg O'Brien
Mom was devastated. She was never the same. She let go a bit that day. Within a few months, Mary had moved back to Connecticut, and Mom was alone again. I noticed a softening in our relationship. Beyond my father, absorbed in his own medical issues, she now had no friends on the Cape, and thus turned to me, emotionally and for chores around the house, as she faced down her demons.
****
I always had thought of myself as Mr. Green Jeans, the genial sidekick to Captain Kangaroo. Mr. Green Jeans always performed ably with hand puppets, talked to Grandfather Clock, introduced live animals, taught little children to care for the Earth, but he couldn’t fix squat. Neither could I. Accepting of this, my mom kept it simple, just asking me in late spring to install the bulky window air conditioner in the living room, replace screens with storm windows in the fall, paint the outside trim, clean the gutters, and wrap the hoses for storage. I think she just wanted me around the house to talk. She was lonely, and when she wasn’t talking, she just stared out of the window. Blank stares, as if she were on Pluto.
On a late Sunday afternoon in October 2000, I finally started to get it. Mom asked me to take her to the bank; I wasn’t sure why. She said she needed to use the ATM. A banker earlier in life and one who had used a cash card often, she told me she was having difficulty with the machine. She couldn’t figure out how to use it; tried several times. She was completely out of sorts.
“Greg, I’m scared,” she told me in the bank parking lot. “I can’t do this anymore. I get confused all the time. I need someone to talk to. Will you help me? Please don’t tell your father!”
I will never forget that day. The sky was gray, the wind was blowing on shore, and there was a penetrating chill in the air.
“Sure, Mom,” I said, beginning to realize her inner fear of losing control. “We’re good now. We’re just good, Mom.”
I never looked back on the relationship, my anger over her rants at me; I only looked forward now. I was Mr. Green Jeans, wholly useless, yet destined to be a caregiver. Hand me the Phillips screwdriver! Just tell me which end is up.
****
Confusion in time gave way to chaos. My mother began putting garbage in the trunk of the car—forgetting to take it to the dump, opting to horde. The maggots and stench were revolting, yet my siblings and I were reticent to deal head-on with it. Mom began hiding money in the house from my father, wads of it; she slept in her clothes; made up words for lack of recall; often refused to shower; and grabbed for liquid soap at times to brush her teeth. Then there were the “menu issues.” My dad in his wheelchair would ask for ice cream for dessert, and she’d serve him eggs, sunny-side up. The behavior upset me and equally distressed my father, who observed it nightly. At first, we collectively passed it off as a change-of-life transition, but the shift intensified.
After all the anguish in our relationship, my mother and I were on parallel tracks. She was years ahead of me, but I could see her in the distance, not sure where she was headed. Yet, I followed. Then one day, my ticket to Pluto arrived by way of a blissful bicycle ride from Brewster. On a postcard-perfect day, I had taken my son, Conor, and his friend, Ryan White, both about 12 at the time, on a trek along the Cape Cod Rail Trail to Eastham, about a 15-mile ride, to visit my mother—a pastoral passage beside sparkling cranberry bogs, lush meadows, saltwater marshes, and fresh water ponds. In all ways, it was a cleansing, majestic Cape Cod day. Mom, however, was more muddled than usual. With the temperature inching toward 80, she scolded all of us for not wearing winter coats. To take the “chill” off, she insisted the boys don these heavy, oversized sweatshirts from a spare bedroom closet, largesse from winters past. They balked at first, but sensing her resolve, I instructed them to oblige.
“Mom’s right,” I summoned. “It’s cold out.”
Conor, having witnessed corresponding episodes in the past, concurred, and Ryan graciously consented. The second we peddled out of the driveway, turning left on Cestaro Way toward the bike trail, the boys ripped off the sweatshirts and tossed them at me.
“No way, we’re not wearing these things!” Conor declared.
I thanked the boys for being good sports, and draped the heavy sweatshirts across the handlebars of my bike as we headed back to Brewster, taking in a panorama of primal nature. I was euphoric, in the Zen, incredibly at peace. I felt like a kid again, and plied the trail in full speed far ahead of Conor and Ryan. Faster, faster! The wind was soothing. In the moment, I recalled that, as a youth, I had prided myself on riding a red, three-speed Schwinn racer, no handed! And like a child, I wasn’t wearing a helmet that day. For 30 seconds, I peddled back in time, a kaleidoscope of images from youth: Rye Beach, the ball field at Disbrow Park, town marina, and out to the American Yacht Club where you could see the Manhattan skyline and Twin Towers in the distance. Then, as abrupt as a clap of thunder, the imagery shifted. I sensed something awry. In horrifying slow motion, what seemed like frame-by-frame, I witnessed the sweatshirts on the handlebars slip slowly into the spokes. My bike, at full gallop, stopped on a dime, and I was hurled head first over the handlebars about 15 feet into the air, but with the presence of mind at least to shield my left hand over my forehead before impact. I hit the tarmac with the force, it seemed, of a .45 caliber bullet, the impact cutting deep into my knuckles right through to the bone. On the second bounce, my face hit the pavement in a pool of blood. I was numb, out of body, yet felt something cold pouring down my face. As I finally stood up, I must have looked like the lead role in a Bela Lugosi movie; in pure fright, Conor and Ryan sprinted off into the woods. Two Samaritans sitting on a nearby back deck came to my aid, and collected the kids. The rest is fleeting; a half hour later I was rushed to Cape Cod Hospital in an ambulance, sirens ablaze. After multiple stitches to the head and left hand, I was discharged.
Little did I know that I had unleashed a monster.
12
PASSING THE BATON
THE LEGENDARY TRACK STAR JESSE OWENS FACED A MONSTER. In the summer of 1936, just years before the start of World War II, demon Adolf Hitler and his Nazi faithful were goose-stepping across Eastern Europe. At the Berlin Olympics, Hitler sought to showcase purported Aryan superiority and chastised the U.S. for engaging gifted African Americans, whom he termed “sub-humans,” to compete against his Aryan Nation. Owens stared the demons down, winning four gold medals: 100 meters, 200 meters, long jump, and 4x100 meter relay, the final affront to Hitler, making Owens the most decorated athlete of the 1936 Olympics. Owens ran the first leg of the relay in a record 39.8 seconds, picking up a two-meter lead, and resolutely passing the baton to Ralph Metcalfe, an African American who was the fastest human from 1932 to 1934, and later served in the U.S. Congress. A purposeful passing, at this critical moment in time, propelled Metcalfe to a four-meter lead, the measure of success. Foy Draper, who ran the third leg, maintained the lead, and 100-yard world record holder Frank Wykoff, with baton firmly in stride lengthened the winning margin to 15 meters, beating his Italian counterpart, Tullio Gonnelli.
An efficacious passing of the baton in a relay race is as elemental as lacing up a pair of running shoes, and has relevance in the race against Alzheimer’s. Timing is critical. When a runner hits a mark on the track, usually a small triangle, the awaiting runner—on cue and face forward—opens a backward hand, and after a few strides, the lead runner has caught up and exchanges the baton. Often, the lead runner will shout “stick!” several times as a signal for the awaiting runner, glancing behind, to put out a hand. Passing the baton has significance on many fronts—on a track, at home, at work, in disease, and into eternity. In the relay race of life, one can’t run alone. You sprint your leg as best as possible, then hand off with precision, letting others carry you as they can. Looking back, I realize now that my mother, in trying to outrun Alzheimer’s, was yelling at me, “Stick … stick … stick!”
****
You can see eternity from Eastham and elsewhere. Ever look between two facing mirrors, at home, in a barbershop o
r a beauty salon? You face a seemingly endless line of images fading into the distance. In principle, it’s called “looking into infinity.” Each mirror reflects the image into the other mirror, bouncing these reflections back and forth into infinity—gateways, some speculate, to parallel universes. If you squint, you might see Pluto and beyond.
My mom was a mirror, preparing me as only a mother could to see through her lens into infinity and pass the baton. The day after I was released from Cape Cod Hospital after the bike accident, she arrived early in the morning at my house in Brewster with bandages and rubbing alcohol in hand. In her altered state, she was rushing over to stop the bleeding. I was covered in hospital bandages with more than 20 stitches to the face and hands, all washed up, and yet, she insisted on cleaning the wounds. Her signals were confused. She was still my mother, knew it, and proceeded to clean the bandages with rubbing alcohol. I let her, realizing she was living in the moment, and at that moment, so was I. She was my mother, even in her Alzheimer’s, and I desperately wanted to be her son.
I hope my children, as this disease progresses, will allow me to be their father. It is vital for those with Alzheimer’s to connect with the past, the long-term memories and relationships. The short term is a flash.
Parallel universes between my mother and me collided after my accident. We were over the handlebars, and together could see into infinity.
****
But one must squint to see into infinity, stretching the mind. The word, with mathematical definition, has derivation in the Latin word infinitas, meaning “unbounded,” a noun with roots in the ancient Greek word apeiros, which translates to endless. In my mother’s final years, I had endless conversations with her, including regular Sunday night tête-à-têtes at the dinner table with my folks in Eastham beside a large picture window overlooking a patch of scrub oak and pine, bent from winter winds into forms that stretch the imagination. The curved oak table with sturdy legs and high-back Queen Anne chairs forced one to sit upright. Bought at a discount home improvement center, it still had the emotive feel of a medieval round table, not because it resembled an antique, but because a Prodigal Son now had occasion for final wisdom from his parents. I cherish those moments, some of them painful, all of them imbedded in my soul.
Dad, as usual, drove the conversation with pounding, penetrating queries, challenging me on politics, sports, religion, sibling rivalries, and just about any other subject one is not supposed to talk about in public. Mom was quick, as she could, on rebuttal. It kept her mind challenged and active. She deflected my dad’s barbs like a veteran hockey goalie, which were meant more to make her think than overreact.
My cerebral training early on was served up in Rye at the family dinner table, a relic today. All ten of us were seated on Brookdale Place on Sundays around a thick plank of mahogany. We were akin to knights in shining armor; only our swords were stainless steel, barely sharp enough to cut the overcooked beef, and our breastplates were paper napkins slung from the collar. Still, we were a force. My folks would query us, like a pop quiz, about our lives, our friends, attitudes, beliefs, and trouble on the horizon, just to get inside our pointy little heads. I thought of the exercise, at the time, as a holy inquest, but as I grew older, I enjoyed the banter. It brought us all together. But there were exceptions. Like the time when my older sister Maureen called me out in high school, lobbed a grenade under the table, for my dating on the sly a well-endowed, exceptionally attractive coed several years older than I was.
“So, Greg, why don’t you tell us about it?” said Maureen, the self-appointed “Mother Superior” of the family.
Dad dropped his fork. Mom glowered at me. And I stared intently at Maureen in an attempt to burn her retinas, but they were blocks of ice.
“So, what’s this all about?” Dad asked.
The sizzling meatloaf before me that I had so coveted had all the appeal now of a pair of worn sneakers after a sweaty basketball drill.
“Oh,” I said lamely, “We just went to the movies together. I think it was the Ten Commandments.”
“Yeah,” Maureen interjected between mouthfuls of mashed potatoes, “Thou shalt not sin!”
“That’s enough,” Dad declared, shutting down the discourse.
I wasn’t sure if he was disgusted or proud of me.
Mom nodded in a way that said firmly: Greg, you can do better.
The look alone served to bring me up short, but those words have become a mantra throughout my life. I still envision my mother urging me on. In the moment, the exchange that day was discomforting, yet enlightening. Looking back, such wordplay reinforces the family dinner table as a forum for in-your-face instruction, edification, and for unforgettable family bonding.
Such illumination continued decades later at the more intimate dinner table on the Cape. Observing my mom’s frontal assault on Alzheimer’s, the wisdom was abundantly enriching. Perspective has a way of cutting through a disease. Every Sunday at twilight after leaving Willy’s Gym in Orleans, I drove alone to Eastham for introspection with my parents. The drive was a timeline of sorts, passing Town Cove to the starboard where schooners once delivered their consignment from the Old World; Salt Pond, a brackish estuary, rich with shellfish, that empties into the Atlantic; Evergreen Cemetery where the markers date back to the time of the Pilgrims, and where my parents eventually would rest; and across from the cemetery, Arnold’s Lobster and Clam Bar, a family favorite where the sweet, salty aroma of fresh seafood off the dock wafts across the tombstones. Arnold’s, formerly Betty’s Beach Box, is run by a childhood friend and Pilgrim descendent, Nate Nickerson, a.k.a. Nathan Atwood Nickerson III, whose Mayflower forbearers settled the Cape. Arnold’s was my mother’s favorite eating hole; she always enjoyed talking with Nicky. Since birth, he has known the difference between a steamer and a quahog, and probably could pronounce the word in utero.
Such distinction was lost in time on my mother. A quahog, to her, could have been a kitchen utensil—a knife or something sharp to stick into an electrical socket, as she often tried. We had to hide the knives. One day, she noticed the kitchen paper towel rack was empty; starring at the exposed cardboard tube, she knew it should be covered with something white, so she laid pieces of bread over the tube as if hanging out clothes to dry. The slide continued with both parents. The dinner table reinforced their decline. At times, my mother served my dad coffee grinds on toast. He never let on in front of me, nor did he want to embrace the stony reality. That bothered me and my siblings terribly. In retrospect, I believe he was trying to protect my mother from reality, as he began his own fearful, slow slide into dementia himself, complicated by the throes of circulation disease and prostate cancer. It was a shit show.
At first, none of us saw the warning signs of Alzheimer’s. We were all numb to it: my mother’s memory loss, challenges in planning and with problem solving, difficulty completing familiar tasks, confusion with time and place, trouble understanding visual images, problems finding the right words, inability to retrace steps, poor judgment, withdrawal, swings in mood and personality, and finally, intense rage.
In the fall of 2007, reality was sinking in. At the dinner table, my parents and I talked more intensely about family, politics, and life; we talked about religion, eschatology, about God, a genderless definition of all-love, and about facing the Almighty one day. I told them several times that something wasn’t right in my head. Dad dismissed it, but Mom always tried to instill courage in me.
“You must have courage, she counseled. “Never give in!”
In the final months, our dinner table discussions centered around topics we had never entertained before. End-of-life stuff. My father, now in a wheelchair with little use of his legs, waxed on about the genius of Roosevelt Democrats, the need to care for the disadvantaged, the moral obligation to pursue a passion in life that made the world just a bit better, and he probed knotty questions about what happens to you when you die. A rock-ribbed Catholic, who had lost both his parents in chi
ldhood, he feared death, and like many of us, wasn’t quite sure of what awaited him on the other side. He was deathly afraid.
Mom seemed to embrace it.
Many years ago, I had a dream about death, one of what was to be several. In the dream, my father had passed away. He was in Heaven. No longer confined to a wheelchair, he was sprinting like a high school tailback, with jet-black hair combed straight back. I told my parents about it over the dinner table on September 16, 2007. I remember the day.
“Was I running to Mom?” Dad asked.
“No,” I said. “You were running to your parents.”
He paused.
“Was Mom there?” he asked.
“No,” I said, knowing the implications of the response. “She hadn’t left yet.”
“Not my time!” Mom evoked with confidence.
And it wasn’t. My father was to die first on January 5, 2008, my brother Tim’s birthday. Mom died four months later on May 21; she was buried on my sister Lauren’s birthday. So much for birthdays.
In that moment, collectively, we were well into the stages of grief: shock; denial and isolation; anger; bargaining; depression; testing; acceptance; and hope. We hadn’t turned the corner yet on hope.
The dictionary defines hope as desire with anticipation; scripture describes it as faith in a seed form. All of us were in need of watering. Mom knew her time, but always held her tongue. Liberal in some ways, conservative in others, walking lockstep with traditional spiritual values, she often said she regretted not speaking her mind on more occasions. It was a sad commentary, given her diminishing state of intellect. Sadly, women a generation ago were to be seen, but not heard. They carried babies, cared for children, and were the fabric that held families together like glue. Imagine what we all could have learned had we listened more.
I listened too late, learning far more from my mother’s assail on death than from her wisdom and duty to family. I whiffed at that. In contrast to the culture today of self-indulgence, the mothers in the Greatest Generation were selfless in devotion, not out of diffidence, but in maternal instinct—a promise of love, beyond the capacity of most men. Even in Alzheimer’s, the love persisted.