IN DECEMBER of 2018, I wrote of Meredith, one of my oldest friends who was diagnosed five years ago at the age of 57 with “Early-Onset” Alzheimer’s Disease.

Since Meredith became sick, we spent many happy times together, walking in the woods, traveling once together to Charleston, South Carolina (where we pretended we were real Southern ladies) for a vacation, window shopping, having lunch and just sitting quietly listening to music or talking, mostly about the people she loved. We had little mishaps and adventures, such as the time I started to take off her jacket in a restaurant because she was warm and discovered she was wearing nothing underneath or the time she collapsed on a busy sidewalk and kind people appeared out of nowhere to help me get her back to my house or the time I lost her at a busy public garden at Christmas. She used to refer to her disease jokingly as “WISE-enheimer’s” and I would say that she was giving it to me. Getting her into the passenger seat of the car was sometimes an adventure in itself because she was easily disoriented spatially. So if she couldn’t drop into the seat, we would circle around the car and approach it again, like a plane coming in for a rough landing. If she still couldn’t make that scary drop, we would stop and circle around again until she had a sense of where she was.

She was extremely affectionate and openly grateful for the little things we did together. Every day, she experienced moments of intense sadness and anguish, but the clouds would pass. This photo of her was taken in March.

Like everyone else, Meredith lived in crushing social isolation during the last four months. Not “alone together,” but alone apart. The isolation was worse, I think, for someone like her because she could not talk on the phone or use the computer or participate in the arithmetical thrills of a wildly exaggerated pandemic. Zoom or online cultural events could not have possibly met her great need for human contact. As her mind declined, nothing mattered to her, but people — the real thing. I remember once she walked up to a man in our favorite consignment store, looked him straight in the face with blazing astonishment and said, “You are beautiful! I want to marry you!” He burst out laughing,. “I bet women tell you that all the time,” I said. I cannot conceive of her navigating a sea of masks. It’s too horrible to contemplate. Like small children, she looked you straight in the eye with all-encompassing absorption. She was avid for faces. And like small children, she saw, with piercing discernment, beauty in faces others couldn’t see.

Starting in March, she was confined to her home, seeing only her warm, devoted husband and an aide, no visitors allowed. She deteriorated dramatically and during the last three weeks was unable to walk much or eat solid food. She died Sunday after a heart attack in her living room and after days of “inconsolable anguish.” On the very same day she died, her first grandchild was born — in a hospital where visitors were prohibited, the generations passing in the night in a hyper-sterile, depopulated landscape.

I could not have asked for a more precious friend.

— Comments —

Joseph writes:

Thank you for the lovely, touching tribute to your friend Meredith. May her memory be eternal.

S. writes:

I am sorry for your loss of your dear friend, Meredith.  Literally I am crying, especially at the last two paragraphs, where she had experienced the severe social isolation in the last months of her life.  So true and relatable on so many levels.

Rest in peace, Meredith.

“Loyal Reader” writes:

I was saddened to read of your friend Meredith’s passing.  You wrote a beautiful, touching tribute to her life, with all the little mishaps and joys that come from attending to a loved one who is slipping away.  My grandmother had dementia, and although she lived to be 100 years old, her remaining years were difficult and challenging as she lived with my mother, who was an only child.  I recently read an old newspaper article from our local paper that profiled my grandmother and mother, written as an example of the daily lives of caregivers.  It reminded me somewhat of Meredith’s life, including the loving care of her husband and you as her friend, just being there day to day.  The article on my grandmother ended with her simple statement about my mother, “She loves me.”

This is what “quality of life” really means – knowing that someone loves you.

Hurricane Betsy writes:

This was tearful reading (for me) until I came to the part about her first grandchild getting itself born the same day Meredith passed on.  This was no accident.  God is great.

Hyper-sterile birth?  This is the standard issue method of birth in hospitals in Amerika, and has been, for ages.  Further, the modern “natural” birth (whether at home or hospital) with family or relatives (especially the father) right in there, watching (or even boldly assisting!) the birth – this is a crime against nature and man/woman relationships.   There is nothing natural about this, it is a modern invention.

Every culture, every tribe on the face of the earth, both civilized and pre-civilized,  has always known this:  that the father seeing and hearing all the details of birth up close causes him to lose his sense of the mystery of womanhood.  These older generations knew that the attraction  between husband and wife would be lessened.  Some things have to be kept personal and private, away from the spouse – and birth is one of them.  Not everything must be shared. There’s too much closeness nowadays – and it is not a good thing.  “Intimacy” between man and woman has its limits.

Well, this is probably news to most people.  When I first heard, decades ago,  that a man watching the birth of his children was unwise,  it clicked in an instant.  The “natural” childbirth advocates had some good ideas, but dad-helping-out was not one of them.

Laura writes:

This was tearful reading (for me) until I came to the part about her first grandchild getting itself born the same day Meredith passed on.  This was no accident.  God is great.

So true.

I think you are right about birthing.

Eric writes:

So sorry to hear of your loss of Meredith. My mother is currently in the middle of the Long Goodbye.

Thank you for sharing Meredith with us.

Laura writes:

Thanks for your kind thoughts. I wish your mother a fond farewell.

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