THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 27, 1994 TAG: 9411230265
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 03 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Coastwise
SOURCE: Ford Reid
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines
I was never a great fan of Ronald Regean, either as an actor or as a politician, but when he announced recently that he is suffering from Alzheimer's disease, I felt a rush of identification with the former president and his family.
Six years ago this weekend, during a Thanksgiving Day long distance telephone conversation, I first noticed that something peculiar was happening to my father. We were having our usual chat about sports and weather when he began to refer to me in the third person.
By the time I visited him in Kentucky at Christmas, he couldn't remember ever having met my wife and he occasionally struggled to recall the names of his grandchildren.
He even looked different. A man who was always reasonably careful about his appearance, he began to leave the house unshaven, in a filthy shirt or with socks that didn't match.
By the next Thanksgiving, it had become apparent that he could no longer take care of himself and he moved in with my older sister, a saintly woman who cared for him until he died two and a half years later.
I saw him several times a year during that period, visiting on holidays and caring for him from time to time so that my sister and brother-in-law could get a break.
The hardest part for me was, I suppose, the role reversal in which the child becomes the parent; The boy must tell his dad what to do.
I do not have a clue about what was hardest for him because one of the first things that Alzheimer's robs is a person's ability to communicate anything beyond his immediate needs.
Sometimes I watched helplessly as he struggled to find words, then gave up in frustration and fell silent.
Watching a man who loved to talk unable even to put together a simple, declarative sentence is a painful experience.
It is a baffling disease. Sometimes he could remember the names of the mules he plowed behind when he was a boy or who played third base on his high school team but he could not remember that my mother had died a few years before or that he no longer had a car.
Later, as he began to lose any control over his body, it got worse. His once mighty limbs shriveled and his breathing was pained. A fiercely independent man was reduced to total dependence.
I hoped then, and I hope now, that it was not as bad for him as it seemed to me.
My father, of all people, did not deserve this.
He led an exemplary life of Christian faith and charity. He neither smoked nor drank and I never heard him use a curse word. Not even damn or hell. As far as I know, he never so much as told a little white lie or cheated another person out of a penny. Always, he gave more than he got.
This disease at least did not steal his kind and gentle nature. To the end, he smiled when people talked to him and he struggled mightily to cooperate.
At one point, I argued that we should consider putting him in a nursing home. My sister would hear nothing of it. I am grateful for many things but for none more than that she prevailed in that argument.
You learn many things about yourself when you take care of someone else. I did things that I would never have dreamed myself capable of.
As my sister often said, when things have to be done, you do them, not think about whether you can.
The last days of my father's life, my sister and I took turns sleeping on the floor in his room so that he would not have to die alone.
A few days after the funeral, I tried to thank my sister for all that she had done but she said no gratitude was needed.
``We're very lucky, both of us,'' she said. ``We got to give something back to him.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo by FORD REID
A favorite photograph of my father, Ralph Reid, with my youngest
son, Nathanael.
by CNB