On Pluto (10 page)

My attorneys were pleased all this was finally in place, but I was having a problem with the upside of it. In my gut, I knew it was the right thing to do; shoulda done it a year ago. Just swallow the pride, sign the damn documents: the Last Will and Testament, the Durable Power of Attorney, the Healthcare Proxy, and the DNR, “Do Not Resuscitate.” I kidded with my wife beforehand that I should be signing a DNS, “Do Not Salvage”—a
Black Irish reference about taking my boat out into the Atlantic one day when the brain cells drain, and rolling off the bow.

I hit for the cycle this day, as they say in baseball, then sat disorientated at a mahogany conference table that I had stained with hot coffee leaking from my Styrofoam cup. I felt naked, fully exposed.

“I know this is difficult,” attorney Chris Ward told me. Four years earlier, I had engaged Ward in a Cape Cod Hospital room in Hyannis in the same legal procedure for my parents. What comes around goes around, I thought, reflecting back on my appointment as their power of attorney and healthcare proxy. Now my wife was next in succession. It was a humbling experience.

Page by page, I initialed all the particulars of documents that rendered me—the so-called bread-winning family patriarch—to the status, I felt, of Clarabell the Clown. Honk the horn for Howdy Doody! I tried desperately to deflect the inner humility. I felt my self-worth ebbing like the tide. The Brewster house, my alter ego, a place where perhaps Henry David Thoreau might have felt at home, was transferred with the swing of a pen to my wife. Don't mean to be melodramatic, but it wasn't about the assets; it was about my profound connection to a place sacred to me—a home, not a house, where we all became a family. Now, I felt like a renter.

So much for any control in life, as we are all conditioned to covet. It had never been about a hand-off to my wife and kids, wholly and happy to do so, but one of losing a sense of self. I felt vacant. No one in the room, including my wife, my best friend, could understand this. I was alone, searching for the humor in it, vowing to find it.

“Yes, Chris,” I replied, in understatement. “This is difficult.”

****

After the swell of documents had been signed, Mary Catherine and I walked quietly to the parking lot and left in separate
cars. She went home to the house. Her house. I went to Willy's Gym, the usual, to run off five miles of mental numbness. Now we had to tell the kids. I had put that off, as well.

Months earlier, I first raised the issue with my oldest boy Brendan on a drive to the western part of the state. Brendan—now a writer/producer in the Boston area—was working with me at the time as a political/communications strategy consultant. On a three-hour drive to meet with a client, Brendan at the wheel, we talked about the Patriots, Celtics, Red Sox, Bruins, all the small talk I could conjure, then got to the point. I had been probing for just the right words, but was coming up empty. How do you tell the first among equals in the family,
primus inter pares
, that he has to row a little harder. I kept thinking back to the day he was born 29 years ago at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital after Mary Catherine's agonizing 23-hour labor. She's right about the pain of delivery; men have no freakin' clue. So typical of the gender, I tried to comfort her, telling her how to breathe, as if you needed to go to Harvard to figure that out. When Brendan finally emerged, I counted fingers, toes, and then saw a tiny wiener. I sobbed like a baby, held my newborn son, comforted my wife, and then like a proud father, darted off to Fenway Park, to the official souvenir shop on Lansdowne Street, to buy up every infant Red Sox apparel I could find.

“I need to talk to you about something,” I told Brendan, as we passed the exit for Lakeville on Route 495, heading for the Mass Pike. “It's about my health. I've been meaning to talk to you for a while.”

“Sure,” he said in an uneasy tone that reminded me of his mood when I told him many years ago there was no Santa Claus.

“I'm fumbling for the right words here, but … ahh, I've been having serious memory problems for some time,” I said.

“What's up, Dad?” he asked candidly, focused on the road and what may lay ahead.

“Well, I've been getting lost often, confused about the time
and place, my judgment has been lacking at times, I'm having difficulties problem solving, and experiencing much rage. Kinda like Gam, you know.”

“What do the doctors say?” he asked. “No bullshit, Dad. What's up?”

“It's not the final act I was expecting at this stage in life,” I said. “I thought I'd bow out more gracefully. But recently, I've had a batch of clinical tests and a brain scan.”

“So what's up, Dad?” he asked again, more to the point.

“I've just been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's,” I told him.

Brendan kept driving, his eyes fixed on the road. He was absorbing, then finally said, “That explains a lot.”

He, like others, had noticed the early symptoms, but passed it off as my eccentricities—creativity—over time. We talked about it for several miles; he asked questions about the diagnosis, what it meant, and about the future for both me and the family. Brendan had more questions; I was getting uneasy with the conversation, thinking about the classic Jon Lovitz line in the movie
City Slickers
, “Too much information!” I shut down. So we drove on, talking about other things, the usual father/son stuff—work, sports, and politics of the day. Brendan reinforced his love and full support, but was predictably guarded in emotion as he digested the conversation—a shield he would drop soon.

****

I was looking forward weeks later to a July 4
^th
weekend trip to bucolic Coronado Island off San Diego, trying not to focus on seminal moments in my life that all seemed to be happening near Independence Day. Coronado, five miles off the port of San Diego, is a paradise of a place—an out-of-body, other world experience, a place where one can forget.

But first there was unfinished business. I had to speak with
the other kids. I learned early on in journalism that if you don't tell your story, someone else will tell it for you. That wouldn't have been right here.

My daughter, Colleen, was on the Cape on a short break from her duties in Washington, D.C. as a communications analyst on contract with Homeland Security. She now teaches underprivileged kids in a Baltimore elementary school. Conor, a junior at the time, studying sports management at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, was hanging at the house. So, we asked Brendan to come down from Boston for a family conference, under the guise that we'd all go to dinner, which eventually we did—a great meal at Joe's Tavern in East Orleans, a local family hangout on the way to Nauset Beach.

I've always been late, and this time was no exception, as the kids waited with inevitable annoyance for me in the living room, as I contemplated in earshot in my bathroom what I was about to tell them. My ears were burning. I was looking for the right words.

“So, anyone want a drink?” I asked, as I finally emerged.

“Daaaaad, let's get going,” Colleen said, with nodding assurance from Brendan and Conor. “It's getting late.”

“I'm having a glass of red wine. Who wants one?” I said in yet another attempt at delay.

The kids, eyes rolling, obliged. My wife, knowing the script, already had hers in hand. Maybe a double or a triple.

“Your father has something to tell you,” she prompted me.

All eyes were in my direction. Stage fright has never been an issue for me, but the words were not flowing, as I was accustomed in life.
Get to the freakin' point
, I thought, assuming that Brendan might already have passed some of our conversation along to his siblings.

It was an awkward talk, one couched with language that explained the diagnosis, the need for the family to buckle up, but left hope in the room. There were questions, tears, and hugs. I
think, at some level, they all knew. No one really wanted to talk about it. Finally, Conor broke the ice, as the youngest of the family can often do.

“So, Dad, you're losing your mind!” he said.

“You might say so,” I replied.

We all laughed; there was no comeback. We all seemed to understand. Now, on to dinner and talk of the Patriots, Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins, Pluto, and the Milky Way. Life goes on, as Robert Frost said, particularly if we seek to move forward; times to share, bills to pay. Woody Allen in a wry exchange in the movie
Annie Hall
put an exclamation point on survival instincts in an anecdote about a guy who goes to a psychiatrist, complaining about his brother who thinks he's a chicken. When the doctor suggests he turn his brother in, the man replies, “I would, but I need the eggs!”

My family needs the eggs.

****

The flight to San Diego was peaceful; departing Boston and flying high above the jagged harbor islands, I tried to leave my baggage behind. I've always been captivated, flying coast to coast, watching this magnificent country unfold beneath me. Good thinking weather. Hours later, as the plane, banked a right over the Pacific Ocean to line up with a runway, I felt cleansed. But as the great Roman Empire scribe Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus cautioned centuries ago, “In time of peace, prepare for war!”

Coronado, connected to San Diego by a ten-mile isthmus called the Silver Strand, offers some of the nation's finest beaches and enough natural beauty and gawking potential to satisfy the most judicious traveler. Spanish for “the crowned one,” Coronado is a jewel of an isle. I couldn't wait.

The first night, Brendan, my brother-in-law, Louie, and I stayed at the Coronado Island Marriott Resort, overlooking the
pristine San Diego Bay and the downtown. My wife, who had arrived earlier, spent the evening at the Hotel del Coronado with her sister, Nancy, who had been named in my will as special family medical consultant; I knew Nancy would always have my best interest at heart, and wouldn't dispatch me prematurely to a nursing home.

After a late afternoon swim, a fresh fish dinner, and a walk along the boardwalk, Brendan, Lou, and I went back to the hotel. Lou, a great guy, but a lard ass of a night owl, wanted to go to bed again, so Brendan and I walked to a bar for a beer. There was still some unfinished business between us. He had no clue. Timing can be terrible, particularly on a flee from reality; it often has no respect for timelines.

I had brought with me all the signed legal documents naming Brendan as my power of attorney and my legal guardian, should something ever happen to Mary Catherine. All assets, if anything left, would pass to him to be distributed to the kids. I was to have nothing, just as the lawyers wanted. Brendan needed to know this. Now was the time. Timing often sucks, even on placid Coronado.

Once again, I couldn't find the right words over a Blue Moon, even with a slice of orange on the lip of a chilled glass. So, we walked back to the hotel and I engaged him in conversation on the second floor balcony outside our room, above what seemed to be a plantation of palms and tropical flowers, sifting in the sultry Coronado ocean breeze.

I showed him the documents. He wanted nothing to do with it. Nothing.

“I don't want to talk about it!”
he shouted.
“I don't want to fucking talk about it!”

“But you gotta,” I said. “You have to know, Brendan. We have to talk. You're the oldest boy and you have to start acting like it. I need you. Get it!”

It was the most powerful confrontation I've ever had with
any of my children, one I hope never to repeat.

I showed him the documents again. He pushed them away.

“This is bullshit! It
's
fucking bullshit!”
he screamed.

“Fine, then you need to see something else,” I replied, opening the door to the hotel room to bring out another pile of papers. They were my medical records, a word picture of a swan dive off a cliff.

“Read 'em,” I said, waving the papers in front of his face. “Look at them. They're right here!”

We were both in rage. My brother-in-law woke up, poked his head out to the balcony, and asked if everything was all right.

“It's fine, Lou,” I said, motioning him quickly back into the room.

Brendan grabbed the papers, about 30 pages in all, and began to read.

He stopped at a page that summarized the neurologist's finding.

“The diagnosis has been made in my opinion,” the doctor's report said. “… I am not sure how much longer he has in terms of being able to reliably and meaningfully provide the quality of work he has put out in the past. It may also be helpful if his counselor would help in negotiating more open discussion of his growing limitations with other family members so he suffers less isolation.”

Brendan was stunned.

“This is bullshit! This is bullshit!”
he yelled in a voice that pierced within.

In primal anger, he ripped the documents into pieces, then tossed them off the balcony. The chunks of paper—my personal, naked, and wrenching medical reports—fell among the palms like a blanket of snow.

“This is bullshit! That's what I think. It's bullshit!”
he yelled even louder, his eyes now tearing up.