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July 12, 2002/Av 3 5762, Vol. 54, No. 43
Sum of a thousand losses
VICKI CABOT
Contributing Editor
"So sorry for your loss."
We were suffused with the sincere condolences of friends. Yet, both mourners and comforters intuited the insufficiency of the mere words, the profundity of the loss.
My father-in-law, Murray Cabot, died June 26, and we are left only with memories of that sweet, gentle man. Our shiva was full of the stories he loved to tell and those we loved to recount. It was the stuff of family lore, the stuff that binds us together.
We are blessed with the capacity to remember. In recent months, our dad was not.
When he died just short of his 88th birthday, he had Alzheimer's, an insidious disease that gradually robbed him of his capacity to reason, to remember, to recall. It is a disease of a thousand losses, lamented a friend who recently lost her mother to Alzheimer's. A thousand losses, indeed.
It's a gradual lessening of the person you have loved, admired, cherished, while retaining amazing glimmers of the person who once was whole. A smile, a touch, a glint in the eyes. "Hi, sweetheart," he would greet me - a clever, endearing ruse by a man who no longer could recall names.
We watched helplessly as the initial lapses multiplied and magnified. There was increasing difficulty in following a conversation, in following directions, in following a golf ball as it arced towards the green. There were the misplaced keys, the lost wallet. There was the increasing confusion, growing frustration, frightening realization that something was wrong.
There was.
My father-in-law's brain was clouded in cellular debris, inhibiting his thought processes.
David Shenk in his classic, "The Forgetting, Alzheimer's: Portrait of an Epidemic," artfully describes the "spherical plaques and stringy tangles" that invade the brain's neurons and hinder its ability to transmit messages. He likens neurons trying to send messages through the debris to trying to kick a soccer ball through a chain link fence. It can't get through.
Shenk's graceful recounting of the course of the disease is framed with chilling statistics. Five million Americans, and perhaps 15 million people worldwide, now have Alzheimer's. By 2011, he projects, 15 million Americans will suffer from the disease. Locally, the Arizona Alz-heimer's Association reports 42,608 individuals age 65 and older suffer from the disease, 78,452 statewide.
It's scary news, especially for those of us who are on the dark side of 50.
The odds of getting developing Alzheimer's accelerate dramatically with age. According to Shenk, Alzheimer's or senile dementia affects nearly half of those 85 or older. There is no known cause or cure.
So countless others, like my father-in-law, will gradually be diminished, and we will be left to mourn their loss - and ours - comforted only by the memories.
My father-in-law's birthday is Monday.
I won't forget.
Contact the writer at vicki_cabot@jewishaz.com.
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