Ten years ago October, I got the worst news of my life.
My lovely wife Nicole, who was just 64 at the time, was going through serious cognition problems that had me worried about what some folks call “Oldtimers Disease.”
Mike, that’s not what it’s called. you know it’s …”
I know the real name. I just prefer to be gentle here.
We saw her neurologist and he referred us to a neuropsychologist for testing.
I don’t remember exactly what the test was, just that a score below 125 meant the person being tested was in the early stages of dementia. She scored 121.
He said she had Lewy Body Dementia, which was dementia with Parkinson’s Disease. He told us she had a year, maybe two before she would be lost in the fog.
It was heartbreaking, but something very strange happened. She got better. A year after the initial testing, she went back in to be retested and scored 140.
The stunned tester said he had never seen improvement like that happen before.
I had very little experience with loved ones with dementia before. In the spring of 1985, the last one of my grandfather’s life, I was visiting him and much of his short-term memory was gone. He asked me the same questions as much as three times in half an hour.
“Where are you living now, Michael?”
“St. Louis, grandpa.”
He was 89 and he didn’t live out the summer.
I saw some of the same things with my mother in 2017, but she was 90. She lived another three years and had a caregiver living with her 24/7.
I’m not sure you ever expect dementia in people you love, but when they are as old as my grandfather and my mother were, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise. But 64? That’s not an age to be concerned about it. Or is it?
The same year my wife was having her problem, Julianne Moore played a linguistics professor suffering from Early Onset Alzheimer’s at age 50 in the movie “Still Alice.”
If dementia at 64 is shocking, at 50 it is positively obscene. Many professional people are at or nearing the peak of their careers at age 50. We tend to think of it as old because professional athletes and actors are aging out of their careers.
I was 50 for most of the year in 2000 and it was the peak of my newspaper career. I can only imagine what it would have been like to be losing my cognition.
Even at 64.
I’m 75 now and I can feel myself getting a little fuzzy around the edges. I have done a lot of writing this year, completing my third and fourth novels. That’s good, but I have exponentially more typos to correct than I ever did in the past. and what’s frightening about it is that they aren’t just hitting the wrong key.
As an example, I can intend to type the word “it,” but when I look back, the word I typed was “if” or “in.”
It just means I have to be a lot more careful about proofreading than I once did.
I’m still very good — sometimes excellent — at the newspaper puzzles I do each day. I can almost always solve the New York Times mini-crossword in less than 90 seconds and I solve Wordle 98 percent of the time and in three guesses or less a third of the time.
Of course I’m not the one I’m worried about.
We had eight pretty good years after learning in 2015 that my wife had been mis-diagnosed with dementia. We had a wonderful Christmas last year with our daughter Pauline, her husband Johnathan and their six children on a Christmas cruise in the Caribbean. Then this year, things started slipping again.
We don’t know yet — we’re awaiting test results — if my wife has Oldtimers Disease, but there are signs that are far beyond just being forgetful. The tragedy of this is that ever since I met and married Nicole in 1992, she has been the smartest person I know.
Don’t you have a male friend who thinks he’s the smartest person you know?
Don’t go there.
When I met Nicole, she was working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which if you’re an astronomer if like playing for the New York Yankees or being a movie star in the Golden Age of Hollywood.
She was a lovely woman, a wonderful mother of two and a world-renowned scientist in her field. She never bragged about it, but sometimes something would slip through. She would show me something that looked totally incomprehensible to me and tell me that aside from her, only one or two people in the world understood it.
Fifty-one days after we met, we married. Everyone who knows me knows that number, but one you may not know is 11,694, as in today was the 11,694th day of our marriage. I would like to get to 13,000.
We are in the 33rd year of our marriage, sadly the last one in which we will be living independently. I can no longer take care of her by myself, and we have a nurse coming in four hours a day to help out. Maybe as early as March or April, we will move out of our home and into an assisted living facility.
Pauline is looking into it and will set it up. She tells me there are three levels of care — low, medium and high. We’ll start out with low (for me) and medium (for Nicole). If there’s an irony in it, it’s that we will almost certainly be moving to Virginia to be nearer to other family members.
It’s a story without a happy ending. I think for the most parent, once you’re 75 the most you can hope for is to minimize the sadness. Hall of Fame manager Casey Stengel might have said the best thing about being old.
When I saw the problems my parents had in their later years, I used to say if I could live to be 80 without being a burden, I would die happy on my 80th birthday.
Now all I want is to be there for Nicole, to get the two books I finished this year published and to watch a little more of the wonderful lives my children and grandchilden are living.
One of the games people play is guessing what the first line of their obituary will say. In other words, what will people remember them the most for.
Nicole Rappaport, a world-renowned astronomer and geophysicist …
Jimmy Carter, the only president ever to live to be 100 …
You get the picture.
I hope I’
m still writing my pown.