Free A Lucky Life Interrupted by Tom Brokaw Page A

out.
    What about those families with modest resources or none at all? Grandma goes in the back bedroom or in a warehouselike facility. It’s now estimated that five million people are living with dementia in America, and unless there is medical relief soon that number will grow steadily. The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that more than fifteen million family members and friends give more than seventeen and a half billion hours of unpaid care to Alzheimer’s patients annually. Medicare and Medicaid help but the financial and emotional price lands on the immediate family, most of them working or middle class and already struggling with their own daily cost of living.
    By Thanksgiving Bill’s condition had deteriorated and he had reached a stage at which he was irascible. He argued with everyone. Nothing made him happy, especially the meal service, an area where he claimed expertise, having been in the restaurant business for so long.
    As a teenager we called him Prince William because he was fastidious about his wardrobe and appearance. Those days were gone as he refused to shower regularly, often sleeping in the same clothes for two or three nights at a time. He needed more supervision, so arrangements were made to move him into memory care, a section ofthe home where the guests are never out of sight of the attendants and their daily activities resemble a play group for grown-ups.
    Mary took him out to lunch while the staff moved his essential belongings into a studio apartment, much smaller than his original space. Everyone was prepared for him to blow up when he realized the switch had been made but he barely noticed, one more sign of how rapidly his condition was deteriorating.
    So much of Bill’s bravado is a cover for what is a vulnerable and sweet personality. We see flashes of that when friends visit or during telephone calls when he remembers a long-gone pet dog or a recent photo of his nieces. Then he retreats into that private world of anger, forgetfulness, and disconnect from the orderliness the rest of us take for granted.
    We’re going through the trials and joy brought on by the journey of the modern American family. Our youngest daughter, Sarah, brought the joy when she decided to become a single mom at age forty-two after a long line of suitors failed to spark the necessary fire in her heart. The sperm donor pregnancy and birth after several tries was a tribute to imaginative new approaches to fertility and childbearing. The sperm donor, a close friend, pitched right in as a surrogate father, a comforting development to Meredith and me, separated as we were from Sarah and Archer by three thousand miles.
    When cancer struck, Archer became even more important in my life because he gave me more reason to survive. I found myself thinking, “Well, if I make eight years Archer will be in the second grade and ready for his first fishing rod that summer.”
    When Sarah took Archer to see Uncle Bill in his new home it had not been a good week—until they arrived. Bill wept with joy when he saw Sarah and her son. As Sarah rolled the always smiling Archer through the dining room the other residents lit up and the staff asked Sarah, not entirely in jest, if she could bring him by once a week.
    All these parts of our family were not on my radar screen a few years earlier. How do you plan ten years or even five years earlier for one six-month period in which you develop cancer and your brother is institutionalized with Alzheimer’s? When those disconnected realities arrived we were fortified by strong family ties and an acute awareness of our need to become even more supportive of one another. We’d been through the onset of dementia with my mother and brother Mike’s mother-in-law.
    Any one of the conditions brings a unique challenge to a family. Given the trends in cancer, dementia, and aging, there are many families of our generation facing similar challenges. As healthcare costs continue to rise, or even