On Pluto (4 page)

The door is open, revealing a time capsule of newspaper and magazine clippings, shelves of books, photos of the renowned, the infamous, and other memorabilia. I am innately connected to this man within and to his memories. In his early 60s, he is
well kept, the product of running four miles a day; his horn-rimmed glasses and long tufts of graying hair evoke the look of a college professor. He strikes me as a bit of a prick, yet engaging. I know him, yet I can't relate in the moment. He's not the person I remember.

“Memory is deceptive, colored by today's events,” Albert Einstein once observed.

Today's events are a flash for me, fully an out-of-body encounter, a flood of disconnected synapses, as I discern a flickering picture as if maneuvering rabbit ears on a vintage black-and-white TV, trying to get the focus just right. The human brain, a fragile organ that inaugurates connectivity the first week
in utero
, contains 100 billion neurons—16 billion times the number of people on Earth—with each neuron igniting more than 10,000 synaptic connections to other neurons, totaling more than a trillion connections that store memories. If your brain functioned like a digital video recorder, it could hold more than three million hours of TV shows, enough video storage for 300 years. Not bad for a mass the size of an average head of cabbage, with the encoding, storage, and retrieval capacity to determine, on a good day, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

So, why can't I get a clear picture today? The image is out of focus. When I look through this prism of an altered state, the picture is muddled. I press on for affirmation.

The man is the essence of a Baby Boomer—an over-achiever, an individual of purpose, gregarious, the oldest boy in an Irish Catholic family of ten, a father of three, husband of a virtuous wife for 37 years, the patriarchal uncle to 44 neices and nephews, and a man who always thought, until now, that better days lay ahead. That's the way it is with Boomers, the invincible generation—sons and daughters of the Greatest Generation whose grandparents endured World War I, and whose parents then survived the Great Depression and World War II, perhaps the last world conflagration until Armageddon. These Boomers, a
record 75 million of them born between 1946 and 1964, first played by the rules, then broke the rules, then made new rules. Boomers grew up in a time when we thought shit didn't happen.

I look to the walls to connect the dots. The writer within grew up in the '50s, formative years when Einstein was still thinking, Hemingway was still writing, and Sinatra was still crooning. Like all Boomers of the day, the man's early life reflects history: the long, fading shadow of Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the dropping of hellish atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Korean War; the election of presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and all the baggage; the apocalyptic Cuban Missile Crisis; the Vietnam War; Woodstock; the birth of free love; and the death of innocence. It was a revolutionary time that spanned perhaps more cultural shifts than any other generation with writers, artists, and musicians who still define this country's political, secular, and artistic persona.

Isn't he a bit like you and me?

Looking around a room, one can learn legions from what's displayed on the walls. They paint “word pictures.” Everywhere, there are historical, framed front-page stories and magazine covers from
The New York Times, The New Yorker, Washington Post
, the
Daily News
, the
Los Angeles Times
, the old
Boston Herald Traveler, Boston Record
, and one from the
Yarmouth Register
, dated July 12, 1861, reporting Abraham Lincoln's declaration to Congress of the Civil War. The office is a news museum of sorts, with news clippings of the firing on Fort Sumter, JFK's assassination, Nixon's resignation, Anwar Sadat's murder, the shooting of Pope John Paul II, the Shuttle explosion, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and much more. In a corner is a frayed copy of the July 21, 1969
Burlington Free Press
announcing that man has walked on the moon. Below the fold, toward the bottom of the page, is a photo of a 1968 Oldsmobile Delmont 88 that took a horrible turn for the worse into history
off a narrow dike bridge on Martha's Vineyard. The caption directs readers to an inside story, the luck of the tragic Irish: Ted Kennedy's “Chappaquiddick incident,” the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, buried on page six.

On the walls are news reports and magazine stories the man wrote years ago for publications—stories on Tip O'Neill, Jimmy Carter, the Kennedy family, Bill Clinton, the federal court system, political corruption, and investigative stories on the mafia. On a wicker chair nearby is a profile of a former Phoenix Superior Court judge, who in the late '70s mentored him at
The Arizona Republic
in the art of court reporting—Sandra Day O'Connor. Years later, President Ronald Reagan appointed the Stanford Law School graduate who grew up on an Arizona cattle ranch as the nation's first woman Supreme Court Justice. Judge O'Connor had urged her student repeatedly before leaving for Washington to keep asking questions.

“Keep at it until you get the answers!” she counseled.

And he does today.

Everything in this room tells a story, purposefully arranged in almost chronological order, as if to remind, almost reassure, its occupant of a timeline, a collective long-term memory, the hard drive of one's life, the answers—from historic events, to family photos, to memorabilia. In a curious contradiction, there's a hint of eclectic New York and Boston family roots, which clash over sports: framed headlines of the New England Patriots, Red Sox, Boston Celtics, and Boston Bruins, alongside classic black and white photos of a young Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Joe DiMaggio, and Lou Gehrig. On a shelf below, a 1917 photograph of a sullen Babe Ruth in a Boston Red Sox uniform stares out blankly. There is a quote of Ruth's below it: “Never let the fear of striking out get in your way.”

Curiously enough, tacked to an adjacent wall is a tale, author unknown, of an Irishman's dying wish with two strikes against him.

His Irish friends relate:

An elderly gentleman lay dying in bed. While suffering the agonies of a pending death, he suddenly smelled the aroma of his favorite chocolate chip cookies, wafting up the stairs. He gathered his remaining strength and lifted himself in the bed. Leaning against the wall, he slowly made his way out of the bedroom and with even greater effort, gripping the railing with both hands, he crawled downstairs. With labored breath, he leaned against the door-frame and gazed into the kitchen. Were it not for death's agony, he would have thought himself already in Heaven for there spread out on wax paper on the kitchen table were literally hundreds of his favorite chocolate chip cookies.

Was the elderly Irishman in Heaven or was it one final act of heroic love from his Irish wife of 60 years, seeing to it that he left this world a happy man?

Mustering one great final effort, he threw himself towards the table, landing on his knees in a rumpled posture. His parched lips parted; the wondrous taste of the cookie was already in his mouth, seemingly bringing him back to life.

The aging and withered hand trembled on its way to a cookie on the edge of the table when he was suddenly smacked with a spatula by his wife …

Fuck off, they're for the funeral!

There will be no funeral today, only an epiphany of what's to come, and with the luck of the Irish, maybe a few steaming hot chocolate chip cookies, as denial gradually gives way, over time, to reality. Stephen Stills had it right: “Love the one you're with.”

I do.

For I must.

For this man is me.

2

M
R.
P
OTATO
H
EAD

A
SEA OF SPRING DANDELIONS OUTSIDE THE BARN IS LEANING
toward the bay in a stiff wind, a wave of yellow. They capture my attention. I am drawn to the cluster. The dandelion—a French derivative for “
dent de lion
,” the tooth of a lion, with its sharp yellow leaves and believed to date back 30 million years—is born as a flower, becomes a weed, dies slowly from the head down; then its white, fluffy seeds, gentle blowballs, genetically identical to the parent plant, blow away to pollinate the world.

And so it is with Alzheimer's.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay
Fortune of the Republic
, “What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” Perhaps Emerson, who succombed to Alzheimer's, was contemplating the dandelion—a free spirit of a plant, a symbol of courage and hope, with relevance in medicine,
legend, and in Christianity. In medieval times, the dandelion, a bitter herb, was a symbol for the crucifixion of Christ.

The virtue of Alzheimer's is a hope for redemption—not here for now, but beyond.

Sitting alone in my office, deep in thought, looking out over an acre of overgrown lawn, sprinkled with dandelions, and surrounded inside by the hard copy of long-term memory, a place where confusion gives way to clarity and humor resurrects, I remember the yarn of the septuagenarian who reluctantly arranged a medical exam after years of denial:

“I have some bad news for you,”
the doctor says after a battery of tests.
“You have cancer!”

“That's dreadful,”
the man replies.

“It gets worse,”
the doctor notes.

“You have Alzheimer's!”

The man pauses to collect his thoughts, then says with full confidence,
“Thank God, I don't have cancer!”

I laugh, but it's more an enigma than a joke.

Some inherit stock portfolios and buckets of cash. Others, hand-me-downs. I've inherited my folks' medical records: my late father, Francis Xavier O'Brien, a mulish second-generation Irish American and a Bronx boy, had prostate cancer, complicated by critical circulation disease and an onslaught in final days of dementia; my mother, Virginia Brown O'Brien, with second-generation Irish roots as well, the hero of my life, died of Alzheimer's in a bruising, knockdown prizefight of a battle, as her father had decades earlier.

I have been diagnosed with both—cancer and Alzheimer's.

I've declined cancer treatment for now, on grounds that no one by choice wants to go to a nursing home. I saw what Alzheimer's robbed from my grandfather and my mother, and learned earlier in life about “exit strategies” from seasoned venture capitalists in New York and Boston. Alzheimer's, to me, is far more distressing than my cancer. I'm looking now for an exit strategy.

You can't remove a brain.

Daily, I return to my office on the Cape in search of a past that has more relevance to me than the present or a future. There is great peace here among the elements of history, humor, and faith—cornerstones in my life. I look for strength from mentors, past and present, referenced in various clips and photos on the walls: celebrated country editors like the late Malcolm Hobbs of
The Cape Codder
, a surrogate father figure: the distinguished Henry Beetle Hough of the
Martha's Vineyard Gazette
, and my late neighbor John Hay, considered among the nation's finest nature writers, on par with Henry David Thoreau. Hay was a man who could paint brilliant word pictures with the stroke of a typewriter key as a master does with a brush. I was blessed in spending time with them, absorbing like a sea sponge as they taught me to write. They all have become an enduring part of what I believe a good writer, a persevering individual, ought to be. Perseverance separates the artist from the dabbler, editor Hobbs once told me. So it is with life; you press on.

Near my writing desk is a copy of the best seller,
The Perfect Storm
, known in these parts as the Halloween Nor'easter of 1991. I first met author Sebastian Junger as a young man when he was a budding scribbler, soon to be star, and I was an editor at
The Cape Codder
, instructing the freelancer in the art of reporting, letting a good story tell itself. Junger, an excellent student with extraordinary drive, excelled beyond all expectation. I find myself today in the midst of my own perfect storm—a rogue wave of fear, perhaps a life unfulfilled.

On a bookcase in the corner are photographs of my children—Brendan, Colleen, and Conor, and my wife Mary Catherine—all reminders of a past and a fleeting present. There is a recent precious photograph taken by Colleen at an Alzheimer's fundraising marathon that she ran in Boston. The photo is of a pure white running cap alongside two purple wrist bands, the symbolic color of the battle against Alzheimer's, all arranged
on a stark linen table cloth. She wore them in the race.

The cap is inscribed, “Dad, this is for you.”

****

Dementia runs in my family, practically gallops on some branches of the family tree. My maternal grandfather, George Brown, died decades ago of “hardening of the arteries,” a code word then for Alzheimer's or vascular dementia. I had a chilling front-row seat as a child, and later, head-on with my mother's slow progression of a death in slow motion. My dad, in the waning months of a complicated medical history, was also diagnosed with dementia, and his only brother, my uncle, now suffers from a variant of Alzheimer's. The images are piercing.