Putting a Pity Party in Its Place:

Looking down the barrel of Alzheimer’s

By Greg O’Brien

The late Hollywood icon Bette Davis was spot on when she intoned, “Old age ain’t no place for sissies.”

Perhaps then, I’m a sissy.

At 71, looking down the barrel of Alzheimer’s, a slow dance progression of mind/body decline, intense loss of self and place, acute spinal stenosis and scoliosis, advancing prostate cancer, macular degeneration, and black hole depression, I find myself at the intersection of two roads diverging in the woods.

Fight or flight.

As Robert Frost reflects in his celebrated poem The Road Not Taken: “Sorry I could not travel both.”

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

“I took the one less traveled by,

“And that has made all the difference….”

Many of us, myself included, get caught in the bear trap of self-pity at times. Yet, I’ve learned the hard way from the good examples of others, like UsAgainstAlzheimer’s where I serve on the board, that self-pity is a party of one, and without any lasting relief, there is sustaining strength in numbers.

My pastor, Doug Scalise, often refers to Psalm 23, a copy of which hangs in his office on Cape Cod: “Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil....”

Scalise knows first-hand about fighting off self-pity. Not long ago, he had a brush with death; an often-fatal heart condition called the Widow Maker, a 98 percent blockage of the anterior interventricular branch of the left coronary artery. He felt severe chest pains after a workout. Shortly afterward, emergency surgery at Cape Cod Hospital saved his life.

“We all have a shelf life,” Pastor Scalise told me recently, as I reach out for guidance. “We’re designed with built-in obsolescence.”

He said that fighting through the perils of life can be like walking through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. “You can’t helicopter over a valley,” he advises. “You gotta walk through it. Mountain hikers know this. The valley is dark, and often you can’t see around the next corner; you just have to keep walking.”

“Alone?” I asked.

Scalise points to a photo of a flock of high-flying geese in his office. “While we’re all told in life to soar like eagles, geese fly even higher in flock ‘V’ formation,” he said.

“It’s a study of teamwork,” he added. “Geese in formation take turns in the lead, breaking the wind; others in the flock draft off the lead, with each bird honking encouragement and benefiting from the bird in front. They all take turns at the front, the hardest role. It’s an exercise in leadership. No one is left alone. And so it should be in life.”

Not long ago, I looked for flying geese at New England Baptist Hospital in Boston, ranked among the nation’s tops in orthopedics. I was there for a critical 10-hour spinal surgery. It was a top-to-bottom fusion of vertebrae and placement plates, screws, steel rods to hold the spine together in the wake of acute spinal stenosis, scoliosis, and mind/body degeneration from Alzheimer’s. On a pain scale of one-to-10, I was at a 30 and reeling from the effects of anesthesia for a prolonged period of time in dementia.

Recovering in my hospital room, I told a young, caring nurse that I wanted to go home.

“You can’t go home,” she declared. “You have to stay here!”

“No,” I replied, “I want to go home. I want to go home to Heaven. Please give me a pill to die!”

“What???” she said.

I repeated myself.

“Mr. O’Brien,” she responded, “if you say that one more time, we’re going to have to put someone in your room on suicide watch, 24/7…You don’t want that!”

“Ok,” I responded, recouping in my best effort to muster some humor in the fog of this valley. I paused, “Can I compromise?”

Humor, particularly of the Irish sort, is as key in life as faith and hope, particularly when trudging through an emotional valley.

“What?” the nurse said.

“Can I compromise? Can my wife Mary Catherine bring in some apple juice, you know,  a.k.a. chardonnay, under cover of plastic? And you look the other way?”

The nurse shook her head, indicating she might be blind to the plastic. then added, “But no pill….”

A while later, I was in stark embarrassment, all exposed, lying naked on my back, while nurses checked my vitals, concerned about related blood clots or a heart attack. The moment, to me, gave shrinkage, in my seventh decade, a new definition. In Alzheimer’s, one can have the filter of Larry David.

Fully humiliated in my awkward nakedness, the only thing I could think to say, totally inappropriately, wholly wrong, my apologies, was, “It wasn’t always that small.”

“What??” the nurses asked.

They just shook their heads, fought back smirks, knowing I was under deep medications and trauma and went about their business. Yet, who knows, I may have become a cult hero on the ward—humor an antidote to wrenching pain. Not sure Pastor Scalise would profess to this sort of humor. I needed to move on to the faith and hope part.

Still feeling sorry for myself, I had a change of heart days later as nurses escorted me around the ward for exercise on my walker, with a stiff back brace in place. On my daily walks I saw so many people far worse off than me that I began to have a change of heart—the medical equivalent to the healing pools of Lourdes.

After a three-week hospital stay, I returned to the Cape reflecting on this—that no matter how badly I felt, there was always someone worse off, and perhaps I could do some good, provide more support to others.

Weeks later, I had another come-to-Jesus moment when I learned that one of my best friends on Cape Cod had just been diagnosed with ALS, an onset with anticipated swift progression. I was stunned. We talked, prayed, and cried together, and I told my friend and his wife that I would be with them throughout their journey.

That day another good friend from church, Steve Chapman, a retired FBI agent, stopped by with a beautiful glass sculpture of a brightly colored angel that he had fashioned. We both believe in angels.

Not knowing anything about my friend’s ALS diagnosis, Steve said, “Now go be an angel!”

While I need bigger wings, I have vowed to put the pity party on the shelf. The Lord works in mysterious ways.