SAG HARBOR
Summer 2014
Morning is the toughest time of day for us now. Will B. wake up happy, willing to follow the plan of the day? Will she dress herself in clothes that suit the weather? Most important, will she know where her handbag is? Or will this be…not a bad day, we don’t call them bad days, we call them challenging days. On a challenging day, the handbag is missing, the car keys are gone, and the schedule is out the window.
On a good day, B. takes her morning pills without a fuss. We have breakfast, and we plan our day. We walk Bishop, I get in a few business calls, and then we go food shopping: the highlight of our day, or at least mine.
Before B. got sick, she loved food shopping. She loved to cook. She wrote three books on cooking and entertaining! All that’s gone. I’m the one who gets us to the markets. I’m the one who insists we cook. I think all the choices intimidate B. now. She stops in the rice and pasta aisle, and for a moment her eyes dance at all the choices. Then she hesitates, and that look of uncertainty comes over her, until her eyes go dull and she purses her lips in a frown. I used to wait beside her, thinking I’d force her to make a decision, and that she’d feel better for that. As the seconds ticked by, my frustration would rise. I’d give her a choice: this brand or that? Eventually I learned to handle that moment—and so many others just like it—by saying, “How about this one?” I was making the choice for her, but that was what she wanted, too. In that sense, we were making it together.
At least, by the diet we stick to, we’ve never been healthier. We may even be keeping B.’s Alzheimer’s from getting worse. That’s the hope.
We’ve actually enjoyed the so-called Mediterranean diet. Fruit for breakfast, sometimes as a shake with wheatgrass and soy milk. Salad and vegetables for lunch, maybe an egg white omelet—and no refined carbohydrates! For dinner we eat cold-water fish like arctic char and black cod. And more vegetables, more salad, more protein. If we get hungry between meals, and need to snack, we’ll have nuts instead of crackers or sweets.
Before Alzheimer’s, B. did virtually all of the cooking. That was her choice; she liked it. She still cooks, sometimes, but it takes her longer. She doesn’t follow recipes—she’s always known how to put a dish together from what’s available, and which herbs and spices will perk up a soup or stew. She still knows, but what starts as one dish may come out as another. She may start a salad for lunch, and presto! It ends up a smoothie. With kale and cucumbers and bananas, blackberries and blueberries. She just forgot what she set out to make, and started again halfway through.
Sometimes, just for fun, I’ll give the Mediterranean diet a rest and shop for one of B.’s favorite dinners: dishes she came to know in Paris and Milan and Vienna as a top model traveling the world. Coq au vin, for one, veal schnitzel for another. Those tastes stir memories, and sometimes a story. Or dishes she loved as a child. One of her grandmothers had a chicken coop and introduced B. to chicken feet! Not long ago I saw chicken feet in the meat section of our local supermarket, and bought them on a whim, wondering if they’d stir childhood recollections. That night, as we cooked together, B. reminisced about Grandma Hart and all the meals she’d gotten from those chickens. There was a use for every part of the bird. Most of Grandma Hart’s dinners came right from the backyard. I can’t stand chicken feet myself, but I sure enjoyed the company. All those childhood memories are still vivid for B., unaffected by Alzheimer’s—so far. As long as we stay back there in those early days, I can pretend she’s the same old B.
We do that a lot these days: sift through those long-term memories. People say, “Don’t dwell in the past.” Let me tell you: with Alzheimer’s, the past is the best place to dwell. You want to linger over every one of those sweet, long-ago scenes. They’re where happiness still resides.
Other nights end in arguing—or worse. A few nights ago we met for dinner at the American Hotel. B. drove from the house, and I came in our other car from a business meeting. We had a nice dinner—and yes, a few drinks, even though I know Alzheimer’s patients shouldn’t drink; we just wanted to pretend things were normal—and then left to go home. I told B. to go first, in her car; I would follow. As soon as we rolled out of town, beyond the streetlamps, I saw that B. was driving with her headlights off. As she passed the little gas station not far from our house, a police car pulled out to follow. Oh shit, I thought.
B. pulled over, and I pulled over, too, maybe three hundred feet behind her. When you’re a black man in America, you know exactly how a scene like this could turn out. A black man coming up the shoulder of the road, approaching a policeman in the dark?
“It’s Dan Gasby,” I called out. “That’s B. Smith. She’s on medication.”
Fortunately, I knew the officer. More fortunately, he knew me. Instead of reacting defensively, he returned my greeting, and I went into my spiel about Barbara’s condition and how her drugs disoriented her. It wasn’t all that persuasive: Why was she driving at all if she was on that medication? Plus, there was the matter of the headlights, not to mention the alcohol on her breath, and mine. But we were less than a mile from our house, and the policeman just waved us home.
I knew we’d arrived at a destination I’d wanted to avoid, but could do so no longer. I made a private pledge that night not to let B. drive again. But in the interest of keeping a happy dinner from ending in anger, I said nothing about it to her. Instead, over a nightcap on the back deck, looking out at the bay, I steered us back to the past, to those early New York days when B. became a world-class model and all her dreams came true.