By the time my grandfather died in 2003 of Alzheimer’s, he’d already been gone from us for years. It’s hard to remember exactly when I heard his last war story or the last time I saw that mischievous grin as he thought of something funny to say. Or the last time we had a simple conversation uninterrupted by the disease.

Those had long fallen away, fi rst in fi ts and starts as his memory slipped occasionally. Then more regularly and alarmingly, as his mind began playing tricks on him. The fi rst time I really understood what his Alzheimer’s diagnosis meant was outside a Mexican restaurant the day I graduated from high school. We were talking when he casually interrupted to point at something non-existent behind me with his trademark grin. “Varmints,” he said. “See those varmints over there? Better get ‘em.”

His name was Arva Dale Chittum and the varmints must have been misfi red memories from his childhood growing up on a dirt farm in the Dust Bowl and Depression in Piedmont, Oklahoma. With a father who died when Grandpa was just ten, he had to work early to help support his mother and three sisters. He enlisted in the Air Force and flew thirty-three missions over Germany in the ball-turret of a B-17 Flying Fortress.

For years, the war was something Grandpa didn’t much like to talk about. It wasn’t until he realized his memories were slipping away that he started talking to me — the history buff in the family — about it. The war became something of an obsession with him, as if he were trying to remember before he would forget. He told long stories about his time in England and in training in the U.S. that I wish I’d have written down. I don’t remember much about them now.

My grandfather’s story is hardly unique. Alzheimer’s is now the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. It’s going to get worse. As the Baby Boom generation gets older, medical advances are helping it live longer, and that will result in a wave of Alzheimer’s suff erers. As it stands now, nearly half of all people over the age of 85 have the disease. The Alzheimer’s Association says at least one in five Boomers will get it or another type of dementia.

Will my generation be able to handle the burden and will it be lessened by new medicines? What will we learn from our parents and grandparents struggles?

Medicare is already overburdened and experts say the half a million new Alzheimer’s cases a year will just make it worse. By 2050, as the population ages, that number will be a million a year.

My grandmother, Edna Mae, refused to put Grandpa in a nursing home. She took care of him at home, with a massive assist from my aunts next door and countless acts of kindness from neighbors and her church community. We didn’t know it at the time, but it turns out that some seven in ten Alzheimer’s patients are cared for at home, a huge and largely unseen burden across the country. Caregivers face diffi cult, sometimes brutal, work. We as a family worried often that it might wear Grandma — a remarkable, indefatigable woman with an optimistic nature bolstered by her deep Christian faith — out.

She got through the trials in large measure with her sense of humor about the situation. We have lots of stories from that time that still make us laugh. Grandma took to putting a cowbell around his neck to make sure she could hear if he roamed too far. One time my aunt rounded the corner to see him dipping French fries into a can of white paint and eating them. Many mornings he talked to a picture of a cat on a postcard, an animal he said went home every night to Yukon, Oklahoma, 190 miles away.

One time Grandma thought he was asleep inside. “All of a sudden here comes the neighbor from across the street and she said Arvie’s at my house, and he wants to rent a room,” she says. “And of all places in the neighborhood this was not where you’d want to rent a room.”

He’d go to restaurants and talk to people he thought he knew — but didn’t — and try to eat off their plates. They called these “Arvie” incidents, laughed at them, and regaled us with tales of what he’d said or gotten into lately. One of his most repeated misunderstandings related to what he thought was a red bull that his mind told him liked to hang out in a particular corner of the front yard.

But there were also the unfunny times when Grandpa wandered off or when he fell on her. Or when his increasingly troubled dreams caused him to fl ail and whack her across the face in his sleep. She took to sleeping with one leg wrapped around him and one hand grabbing on to his nightshirt, in part to keep him from fl ailing, but also to keep him from wandering off in the night. “Oh, it’s a mean disease,” she says. But she soldiered on, and as far as I know never voiced a doubt about whether her choice to care for him herself was the right one.

In our fi rst-hand experience, Alzheimer’s is a devastating illness whose impact is multiplied by how dramatically it aff ects the lives of those around the suff erer. Taking care of Grandpa was more than a full-time job. It was an aroundthe- clock responsibility that meant a near-total change in lifestyle. Grandma couldn’t leave the house without having someone to keep an eye on him. She learned that it was oftentimes better to leave him on the ground if he fell rather than try to pick him back up herself. “I got to where I could feed him or shave him or lay down there with him,” she says.

But we were also lucky that the personality changes that so often alter a loved one with Alzheimer’s were never that dramatic with Grandpa. He was pretty much the same sweet, good-natured man we’d always known, just increasingly unable to remember our names or how to do basic things like put on his shoes.

Aunt Sherri remembers the glassy stare he got when he was seeing things. One time, “I said ‘what do you see?’ and he’s looking out the window and he said ‘a jackass.’ I asked if it was an animal or a human. He said, ‘I’m sure it’s a man because he’s fooling around with my wife!’ ”

The most haunting thing about Alzheimer’s is how it trapped Grandpa in his own mind. Though I never heard him complain, it was evident at times just how frustrated he was with his declining faculties. And he had good days and bad days.

On good days we might be able to jog his memory with a question about his childhood or the war and dig a few words out of him. A fl ash of recognition would cross his face and often he would get the twinkle in his eye we knew meant he was about to say something funny. More and more, the twinkle would come, but the words couldn’t follow.

His basic values seemed seared into his consciousness. Up until near the end one sure way to get recognition from him was to ask him, a teetotaller, if he wanted some alcohol. “No!” he’d reply emphatically.

But in the last year or so of his life, the bad days came to dominate. Asking him a question brought no response, as if he were unable to hear us. He was increasingly susceptible to infections and had to be hospitalized several times.

I flew home from New York a few days before he died. He had taken a turn for the worse and I didn’t know if I’d make it back to Coff eyville in time. He held on for a week and a half as his body shut down on itself. The disease not only robbed him — who was otherwise healthy and strong — of the last ten years of his life, it surely shortened that life significantly.

It was hard seeing him fall into dementia in his last several years. But he was always cute, always good-natured — even in the depths of this terrible disease, one which can make its affl icted angry and mean.

It’s like it peeled away layers of his mind, until it got to the core. And there, with a mind like a child’s, we found him gentle, humorous, and kind. Funny, that’s how we always knew him as a man.

		Ryan Chittum writes about the business press for the Columbia Journalism Review. He was a staff reporter of The Wall Street Journal in New York for several years covering real estate and recently moved to Washington with his new bride Anna.   Previous | Next