“She redecorated every house we ever lived in,” her daughter remembered fondly. “Everything on the walls was handmade by Lori; every Christmas ornament on the tree.”
Lori took care of the odd jobs around the house, too, tending to the lawn and functioning as a self-taught handyman.
Eventually, Steve earned a promotion that would move the family to Laramie, Wyoming, and allow him to be home with his girls every night. Cradled by the Laramie and Snowy mountain ranges, it was the kind of place that appealed to the McIntyres’ free-spirited family, and for them, it became a hometown.
Lori wasn’t particularly close to her younger brother Dean while they were growing up, the way Doug had been. But in adulthood, the similarities in Lori’s and Dean’s personalities became more apparent, and they grew closer, especially once they started raising children. Ask anyone in the DeMoe family to name their favorite sibling, favorite cousin, or favorite uncle, and invariably, one name came back: Dean.
• • •
He was always the wittiest of the four boys, fun-loving and handsome, with laughing eyes, a dimpled chin, and a shock of ruffled dark brown hair. Compactly athletic, he was a study in contrasts: Eventually he became a dedicated family man with more than a touch of a wild streak, widely respected in his business dealings, but just reckless enough to be dangerous. Even in a family of men admired for their work ethic, he stood out. Dean regularly did the jobs of seven men while working for an asbestos abatement company. In his forties, when he returned to the oil fields, he frequently put in seventeen-hour workdays, shaming the effort of men half his age.
Like Doug, Dean fathered a daughter with a girlfriend, but unlike Doug, he resisted settling down. He sometimes jokingly referred to weddings as “another funeral,” and he vowed he would never marry. But he loved his daughter and fought hard to stay in the little girl’s life after his relationship with her mother ended. After initial custody struggles, Dean established a visitation schedule with his daughter, who had moved to Fargo with her mother and her stepfather.
Dean was a man who valued loyalty, especially in the face of potential disaster. He and his best friend, Monte Olson, met as juniors in high school while working summer jobs at a sprawling gas plant on Tioga’s outskirts. Monte was driving a work truck back to the plant to pick up some tools, and Dean was loading sulfur with a backhoe. The backhoe’s muffler somehow sparked, igniting a fire. At a gas plant, that was an instant emergency. In that split second, both boys—sons of the oil field—recognized the potential for disaster. Monte jumped out to help.
“We both didn’t know shit about nothing,” Monte said, “and we both, together, got this fire put out.” It was an experience that would bond them and serve as a metaphor for the days to come: It seemed as though they were always operating just this side of danger, and they always managed to bail each other out. Over time, while Doug became more vulnerable, Dean began to feel invincible.
After high school, Monte went to college to study engineering, and Dean stayed on the rigs, but they still worked together from time to time, surviving at least one more near-miss industrial accident. The two men boxed together, drank together, and chased women.
The same year that his daughter was born, Dean finally met his match in the unlikely form of Deb Clark. She was six-foot-one, a standout basketball and volleyball player for Jamestown College. The daughter of a quiet, respectable insurance company man, Deb came from a devoutly Christian family; neither of her parents drank or cursed.
Dean wasn’t intimidated by Deb’s height, though when they began dating, he did develop a habit of walking on the curb to seem a few inches taller. On one early date he took her to a water park, where Dean tried to impress her by flinging himself down the tallest slide—backward. The park staff promptly kicked him out, a recurring theme throughout his life.
Deb’s parents were less than thrilled with her new romantic interest.
“It’s not that DeMoe boy from Tioga that boxes, is it?” her father asked. It was.
“I had to really convince my dad that maybe that would change,” Deb remembered.
But change Dean did, and remarkably so. In September 1987, about a year after they met, a friend of Dean’s moved to Colorado and took a job in asbestos removal. Dean joined him in Denver, and Deb, who was looking for a teaching position, followed along.
It was a relationship that would shape the two wildly different personalities from within. Dean mellowed and began adapting into a family man; Deb, the dedicated Christian, lived with him, becoming his common-law wife without the benefit of a church wedding until years after their two children were born. She struggled with that dichotomy, particularly since her parents did not approve of their arrangement. But such was her dedication to Dean that she waited him out until he finally decided to marry.
In 1989, their son was born.
In 1996, Deb gave birth to Dean’s second daughter.
Despite how pleasant life was in Denver, Deb always imagined the family would wind up back in North Dakota. She missed her parents and both of their extended clans. Their chance came in 1997, when the Red River Flood wreaked havoc on the eastern side of the state, causing billions of dollars in damage around Grand Forks. A friend of Dean’s won a four-year contract to remove asbestos in buildings that were damaged by the flood. He contacted Dean and offered him a job.
“We wrote a pro and con list out,” Deb recalled. “Actually, there weren’t many pros for leaving Colorado, other than family. But that outweighed everything else on the other side.” Living in Grand Forks would put them close to Karla and Matt, and to Deb’s sister.
In deciding to move back home, they also went ahead and fulfilled one of Deb’s long-held wishes by finally having a church wedding on December 23, 1999, the same anniversary as Deb’s parents. Every year thereafter, Dean and Deb went out to dinner on the anniversary with her parents, who had come to love Dean as a son.
Dean settled in, and, as was his habit, got to work. He traveled often for the asbestos removal company, calculating estimates and overseeing the actual job. But when he was home, they were happy; he loved playing pickup basketball in his driveway with his kids, who had inherited their parents’ passion for sports. The loser had to make milk shakes, and Dean let his younger daughter win quite a bit.
• • •
Though most of the DeMoe siblings harbored bitter memories of their father, it was Jamie, the youngest, who lived deepest in his shadow. He closely resembled Moe; they had the same sandy hair and sincere smile, their eyes crinkling identically from long days spent outside.
Jamie remembered little about his father except the two things most people remember: how big he seemed to be and how hard he worked. “I never really got to hang out with him or anything, because he worked all the time,” he said.
These memories most likely come more from his siblings than from Jamie’s own experience, though, since Jamie, born in June 1971, was nine years younger than Dean, and just seven years old when Moe departed for Jamestown. In the years leading up to that, when Moe was forced to quit working and Gail took a job to support the family, Jamie was stuck at home with his father, who was often not in his right mind. If Moe was asleep while Gail was at work, the little boy would just run around outside by himself.
Whether because of Moe’s volatile omnipresence or the age gap between Jamie and the rest of the pack, Jamie’s was not an easy childhood. The hearing in his left ear was somewhat compromised, and he struggled with learning disabilities that Tioga’s small-town school system was slow to address.
At home, his brothers liked to tease him for his slight build and for being so much younger than everyone else.
“You’re the mistake!” they’d tell him, even as an adult. Yet despite their ruthlessness with one another, their loyalty to those they loved was unwavering.
Sometimes the older kids would babysit him or take him to the movies. But Karla also admits guiltily that she ducked out on “Jamie duty” more
than once. She remembered driving past her mother’s house in a car full of friends, seeing her brother sitting on the curb, and announcing, “It’s not my turn to watch him!” before zooming off.
Those early, fractious years began to take their toll when Jamie moved into junior high school. He started to misbehave. And Gail, weary veteran of her husband’s explosive violence and the endless carnival of her five other children, was spent. In 1983, she sent him to briefly live with Matt and Karla, who was thirteen years older than Jamie, in Fargo. He attended junior high in the larger school district, which finally identified his learning problems.
He lasted in Fargo only a few months. Karla and Matt had their own baby and just one car between the two of them. Jamie could walk to school, but Matt and Karla both worked, and by the end of the day, they were exhausted. They’d come home to find that Jamie had set up a Monopoly game, hoping they’d play with him, but they were just too tired to oblige. Eventually, they sent him back to Tioga; but there, finally, after years of being everyone’s afterthought, he began to hit his stride. He didn’t seem to resent his mother for sending him away, or his sister for sending him back. In fact, he would remain close to both of them as he grew into adulthood.
Most people, including Jamie himself, described him as a classic worrywart. An undercurrent of anxiety flowed through everything Jamie did, whether he was working, playing golf, or even driving his car. He checked over his vehicles meticulously for any sign of malfunction, hoping to ward off disaster. In that way, he was like his brother Doug; he always expected the worst and prepared accordingly.
Despite his innate pessimism, in high school Jamie developed a reputation as a ladies’ man. He was handsome and outgoing, and loved the usual Tioga pursuits: snowmobiling, tearing around on motorcycles, partying at the dam.
Jamie was only a few years older than Brian’s children, and nine years older than his nephew, Brian’s son. In some respects, they were closer to being his peers than his siblings were.
“He was the hottie all the girls were after,” said Doug’s daughter, who was thirteen years younger than her uncle Jamie. The family joke was that between Dean, Doug, and Jamie, the brothers had dated every available woman in Tioga.
Though he grew up immersed in his family’s sense of humor, Jamie never really learned to roll with the punches. He hated being the butt of jokes. He was sensitive to how other people perceived him and defensive about his careful habits. If it took most people three minutes to accomplish a task, it would take Jamie twenty, because he wanted to think each step through carefully and then double-check it. In an effort to stay on top of jobs, he created to-do lists on Post-it notes that he stuck all over the house. He was zealous about the lawn, too, mowing it to perfection. But if a pipe burst or another household crisis suddenly erupted, he froze; adapting quickly to surprises simply wasn’t in his nature.
• • •
Their individual idiosyncrasies notwithstanding, the DeMoes generally believed their fight with Alzheimer’s was over once Moe was gone. The siblings packed away their memories of those hard years—including the letter Karla received from Leonard Heston and June White—the way Gail stored Moe’s letters in a box under the bed they’d once shared. Their lives were now their own, they thought, and the future was theirs to shape, unfettered.
Part
TWO
What’s past is prologue.
—William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Eight
A BLAMELESS AND UPRIGHT MAN
Then the Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.”
—Job 1:8
IN 1995, THE extended DeMoe family gathered for a reunion in Brule, Wisconsin, where Moe’s sister, Pat, had settled with her husband, Rob Miller, and their three daughters. Traditionally they got together at Gail’s place in Tioga over the Fourth of July. But that year, they all trekked back to Moe’s home state and Pat’s cabin—Gail, her six children, their spouses and families, and Pat’s three daughters, who were also grown and raising children of their own.
Gail and Karla were particularly excited to see Jerry, Moe’s younger brother who had spent his high-school years living with Gail and Moe after Wanda’s death. Now Jerry was forty-nine years old and living in Oklahoma with his wife and daughters. Gail had been like his second mother, but these days she seldom got to spend time with him.
Perhaps it was because she hadn’t seen Jerry in so long; perhaps it was because Moe’s decline and death six years earlier were still so vivid in her memory. But Gail noticed immediately the difference in her brother-in-law: The repetition. The halting speech. The blip of vacancy in his eyes. When he went golfing, he didn’t know which way to hit the ball. Karla saw the pattern, too.
It was all much too familiar.
Gail pulled Jerry’s wife, Sharon, aside at the reunion and urged her to face the problem. For Gail, better than anyone in her family, knew what hell lay ahead.
• • •
Though she didn’t act on it right away, Gail’s warning stuck with Sharon. While she knew Jerry’s mother and oldest brother had died from Alzheimer’s disease, she and Jerry had never talked about it much, or considered it relevant to their lives. She remembered disagreeing with the decision to put Moe in a nursing home, though it didn’t change her affection for Gail and the rest of the family.
“In my mind, it wasn’t going to happen to us. I thought Jerry was different,” she said. “I don’t know why.”
Jerry and Sharon had a full and active life together; married in 1968, they had two girls. Jerry taught diesel mechanics at Oklahoma State University Institute of Technology. Sharon was a homemaker, and eventually, she homeschooled Sheryl, their younger daughter. They were deeply involved with their Christian church, and in their spare time, the family took food and necessities to the needy.
Jerry talked a lot about his longing for a boy in the family, but that never interfered with his adoration for his girls. When his oldest turned sixteen, he rebuilt her a red Volkswagen bug and taught her how to change its oil; for his second daughter, ten years younger, he forged a go-kart from scratch. He was also part owner in a plane and spent hours working toward his pilot’s license.
In the wake of Gail’s comment at the reunion, Sharon forced herself to pay more attention. The truth was, small lapses were starting to add up to a more ominous picture: Jerry, always a genius at anything mechanical, was beginning to struggle at work. The school was starting to emphasize technology as the diesel field became more computerized, and Jerry was having to ask some of his colleagues for help. Sharon minimized these struggles initially, but after both Gail and Karla pointed out changes in Jerry, her small anxiety began to grow.
Jerry agreed to get tested at the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland, just to be on the safe side. Sharon sat Sheryl, her younger daughter, down to explain that her father might have the same disease that her uncle Moe had had. Sheryl took it in stride; she and her sister had been so sheltered by their parents’ love growing up that she couldn’t imagine things not turning out fine.
“I had no idea what was to come,” Sheryl said.
She thought her father might be somewhat forgetful, or act out of character. But she had faith in their strong family bonds: “He would need our help, and he would eventually die. OK, everyone does, right? He’s my dad, I love him, and I will do whatever I needed to do for him.”
• • •
In addition to APP and PS1, a third mutation—PS2—had been identified six months earlier on chromosome 1. But blood tests were not yet commonly available, even to NIMH. In the absence of an actual, physical diagnosis, in Bethesda Jerry underwent two weeks’ worth of tests such as an electroencephalogram, or EEG, in which electrodes attached to the head record the brain’s electrical activity, and pencil-and-paper evaluations. The results pointed to the worst: Through process of elimination, he was
diagnosed with “probable Alzheimer’s disease.” At forty-nine, Jerry had been declining for two years. He had had some hearing loss related to his military service and a history of migraine headaches, and he struggled with arithmetic, memory, and reading. His IQ was measured at 84—placing this bright, mechanically talented man in the low-average intelligence range.
Doctors prescribed Tylenol to help with his headaches and a low-cholesterol, high-carbohydrate diet rich in fruits and vegetables. The diet was widely promoted at the time as a heart-healthy option, and both obesity and cardiovascular disease have been associated with a greater risk for Alzheimer’s. Because the heart pumps about 20 percent of the body’s blood to the brain, any damage to the heart or blood vessels affects the brain’s blood supply. In addition, researchers have been exploring the role of cholesterol in Alzheimer’s disease for years because it regulates both the generation and clearance of beta-amyloid, the main ingredient in Alzheimer’s plaques. Doctors also thought Jerry might explore the use of tacrine, a drug that had recently been approved by the FDA for mild cognitive impairment.
The doctors recommended against Jerry pursuing his pilot’s license, which they deemed too dangerous; in fact, they thought he probably shouldn’t even drive a car much anymore.
There would be no more airplane. No more tinkering in the garage. No more teaching technical college. At forty-nine, in one short medical visit, he’d gone from being the man of the house to a dependent. Soon, he wouldn’t even be trusted to drive the cars he once knew how to build. Yet, devastating as this was, Jerry managed to take it in stride. He had suspected something was wrong, but he intended now to make plans that would cushion his family as he declined.
The Inheritance Page 9