The best of humanity can be found in the worst of times. We see this today on the front lines of the Coronavirus pandemic—acts of noble kindness, often found in unexpected places. At a time when we are told to separate, compassion is bringing us closer together. Let us hope this is the new normal—the bottling of benevolence.

The "Lunch Ladies" of Outer Cape Cod are pitching in, as many around the country, in helping to feed the hungry, from young children to seniors, while bracing from Coronavirus. From first responders to the “Lunch Ladies,” we all live in a pretty caring country…

My mother, Virginia, loved yellow – the color of the mind and the intellect, the third chakra in the solar plexus, representing personal power and spark. Yellow is the hue, most visible of all, of memory, hope, happiness, and enlightenment. Yellow inspires the dreamer, encourages the seeker. My mom's rapture with yellow was an upward, heavenly turn in her stages of grief. Yellow also is a color of angels, and in scripture it symbolizes a change for the better. My mom, who died of Alzheimer's in a bruising battle with the disease, believed in angels.

Mother’s Day has a way of bringing us back to the womb, providing prospective beyond a Hallmark card or bouquet of flowers—flashes of reflection, a carousel of streaming images on an old-school slide projector embedded in the mind. The images keep flashing beyond the day. Memories abound.

A sea of late spring dandelions outside my barn is leaning toward Cape Cod Bay in a stiff wind, a wave of yellow. I am drawn to the cluster. The dandelion—a French derivative for “dent de lion,” the tooth of a lion, with its sharp yellow leaves and believed to date back 30 million years— is born as a flower, becomes a weed, and dies slowly from the head down… And so it is with Alzheimer’s.

Memories abound beyond a prized snapshot—in Back To the Future, the photograph fades. While memory is defined by the experts as the brain’s facility to encode, store, and retrieve moments and information, the definition is far deeper than that.

This pillaging disease—one that can take a quarter century or more to run its deadly course, akin to having a sliver of your brain shaved every day—knows no demographic, no race, color, political party, or any other persuasion. Sadly, it affects women, Hispanics, and African Americans in far greater numbers than white Irish guys like me. But a death is just that—a death, resulting in partners without lovers, spouses without mates, children without parents, grandchildren with fewer loved ones to hold them. In the last several months, I’ve lost five close friends to this disease.

Changing a play at the family scrimmage line is an intense ordeal, fraught with anxiety. Several years ago I had to call an audible, telling my children I was diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer’s and carried a key marker gene (link is external)--the fifth family member to battle dementia. Now I had to break the news that our 14-year-old family dog, a stunning, loyal yellow Lab named Sox, who had defined us with unremitting faith, hope, and love, and was my guidepost in this disease, was going to die that night. Failing kidneys, internal bleeding and neurological complications were overcoming Sox, and I was to be the executioner.

The bite of the black dog can be worse than its bark. To some, the black dog is man's best friend, a faithful companion in the rear of a pickup truck. To others it is a metaphor for the shadows of depression… All I know is that I can't sleep at night, haunted by demons of depression that keep me captive in the early hours of the morning.

The stairwell seemed to have no ending, an abyss of a downward spiral. At the bottom, there was no lobby, just white sheets draped over furniture, empty room after empty room. The place had the smell of mildew, as if someone had tried to extinguish the flames of hell. My mind was racing. I was lost; delusions were in full gait. I ran up to the next floor. Same frightful panorama. My cell phone couldn’t connect, no signal. Dammit, no signal! Can you hear me now, I cried within? In a flash, Le Montreux Palace had become the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and I was writer Jack Torrance seeking haunting solitude to create. “All work and no play make Greggie a dull boy...”


“You’re not getting out of this,” my doctors tell me. So I try to fight back, stay locked-in as a missile is on target, to slow the progression of this disease. But “locked in” likewise is a medical disorder in which an individual who cannot speak because of paralysis communicates through a blink of an eye. Some days, I find myself between definitions—using every available memory device and strategy, cerebral and handheld, to communicate.

Like all of us, I will die without the answers, but I will run the race of knowledge. In the process, I seek redemption from my enemies, family, friends, and from God, or however one defines the universe or omnipresent. I’m hoping redemption is in my quiver, as I’ve come to realize on the backside of my 60s, that I’m a bigger transgressor than most, having committed every sin imaginable, other than murder and adultery, and having been tested in both. I’m no Puritan, no altar boy, just a guy striving beyond my grasp for what is real, for faith. Alzheimer’s has brought me to this place—pursuit of truth, wherever that takes me. And I’ve come to understand that if you want redemption, you have to give it.

At 78, there are a lot of miles on Bob Bertschy, who, as a lanky young ballplayer, crouched behind home plate, wearing the “tools of ignorance,” as a catcher with the Los Angeles Dodgers organization…A man of strong faith, Bob straddles this life and the next, seeing things beyond the view of others, often times seeing things that aren’t there. Frequently, he notices strangers lurking in the house—illusions from his disease. Then he’ll spot his golf bag in the corner with thick wool head covers for his drivers. One day, having one of his hallucinations, he yelled at his wife, saying, “There are a bunch of midgets over there staring at me! What the hell are they doing here?”

Sounds of change, when I think of my daughter: the first cry of a beautiful little girl entering the world in the delivery room of Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital; her laughter at walking Brewster flats as hermit crabs tickled her toes; her anticipation as she climbed for the first time those steep steps of the yellow school bus on her way to kindergarten; the cheers on the softball field as she turned a double play; the stench of the old Boston Garden as we watched Disney on Ice together; the swing of “Sweet Caroline” at Fenway; sitting in Tom Brady’s personal suite for a Pats game at Gillette Stadium; the rip of my heart as she left for Elon University, and I felt in change there was something terrible wrong. Then, the first time she brought her husband to be home with her, and I felt something was terribly right.

Bless you, Larry David! We all need to take a page from you. Not long ago, neurons in my head from progressions of dementia misfired again in public; this time at Boston’s Logan Airport on a trip to Los Angeles with my wife—blanks due mostly to the shrill noise and seizing confusion of flying. I wasn’t acting “first classy,” and was suffering from the isolation of feeling somewhat useless, as I often do now…

I had another Larry David moment in Scottsdale, Arizona heading to the airport with my wife Mary Catherine and son Conor. The “Warden” (aka Mary Catherine) let out too much rope, and asked me to call an Uber to the hotel to take us to Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport for the trip back to Boston. So I punched in the specifics, noting we were going to Scottsdale Airport, a small plane, community airport…Wrong punch! The start of a day I’ll never forget.

By hook or by crook, I was destined to connect in Ireland with John Joe Vaughan—two brash Irishmen separated by a sea of blue, roiling waters rushing to a horizon where water flushes up against the sky. It was God-ordained. We are brothers, joined now in a worldwide fight against Alzheimer’s, from Cape Cod to the Irish Sea. I found my soul here…

My close friend Steve Johanson, a man of great faith, in a shared passage, battling the demon Alzheimer’s, passed peacefully at 12:20 am Easter Monday few years ago in a Wellesley nursing home outside Boston after a bruising bout, a “No Más” final round, then a serene handoff from the mind to the soul. Winds of change carried Steve to new heights from a midnight embrace with his wife Judy to the freeing of paradise where there are no tears, only for those left behind. Wrote Steve, an avid sailor, years ago: “When the wind shifts, you don't give up. Adjust your sail, and chart a new course.”

Writer Ken Kesey, author of the iconic, pioneering 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, never lost his footing in his finest work, writing of the misunderstood and the struggle against the system, adapting personal experiences from working the night shift in a psychiatric ward at a mental institution. Kesey never accepted that the patients were insane, but instead that the world had cast them out, given they did not meet conformist standards of behavior. There are great parallels in Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, as we press forward in faith, hope, and humor.

I was to meet the Very Reverend Tracey Lind, retired Dean of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland, for morning coffee recently at the Hot Chocolate Sparrow in Orleans on Outer Cape Cod. We’ve become good friends. She preaches during the summer at the Chapel of St. James the Fisherman in nearby Wellfleet, and still writes with great talent on her blog titled, “Interrupted by God.” A victim of frontotemporal dementia, a subject of a CBS 60 Minutes segment, Tracy is an inspiration to me. I wanted to be on good behavior, but wasn’t dressed for the occasion. It still has Tracey laughing…