Pick's Disease

 

 

One of my favorite pastimes is to drive around the hilly town in Wisconsin's Driftless Region that I have called home for the past seven years every Saturday afternoon with the radio tuned to 89.9 FM. From Madison emanates WORT, an excellent community radio station on which I am an occasional DJ; its Saturday fare is reggae from noon until two, African music from two until four, and Cuban/Latin music from four until six. A public radio station from Iowa transmits at the same frequency; it blasts opera into the ether at that same time. Depending on the altitude and angle at which the car is inclined, I hear either Angelique Kidjo or Aïda, either Celia Cruz or Berlioz, either Bob Marley or Rossini. Often, I hear both stations trading ganja-heavy bass licks and coloratura-trilled vocals in rapid succession or overlaying each other, which is especially enjoyable when both musics are in the same key. I wish I could record these irreproducible moments spawned by the FCC and topography, but I can't, so I keep them in memory instead. Come down and visit me sometime on a weekend, and you'll hear what I mean.

If I drive a little farther out of town in the right direction, I lose both stations in a soup of static. At those times, I think of my friend Don.

Don is--or was--one of the most brilliant men I've ever met. He could do anything by himself, and he did that a lot because he was convinced that no one else knew what the hell they were about. What often annoyed people was his acidic candor: He made sure that everyone else knew how little he thought they knew, and the irksome cherry on top was that he was always right. He built houses, ran a photography studio, and established a now-thriving Christmas tree farm on 240 gorgeous, steeply angled acres south of town. They were all perfect successes, but they were never enough.

He was wont to spend his mornings in the bakery downtown, eating donuts, drinking coffee, and informing employees of the local power company, whose offices were just upstairs, of their multitudinous errors of judgment, organization, infrastructure, and accounting. Don's harangues were brought to an end when one of them finally offered him a job to shut him up--as if that would do it. Now they were paying him to point out all their flaws, to be told they were idiots, but they knew deep down that he was correct. Better to pay him now than the piper later.

Don had moved here from a small mountain town in eastern Kentucky back in the 1960s with a wife whom he'd known since high school. She ran off with another local in the mid-1980s and settled in Madison. While attending a high school reunion, he bumped into Betty, another classmate; they ended up falling in love, and she moved up here to be with him. I attended their wedding seven years ago. They'd been together for a long time before getting hitched, and we all knew that she was taking on several handfuls. Yet it was clear that Don really loved her and that their problems would be dwarfed by their devotion. They lived together up at the farm for years in happiness, and then things took an odd turn.

Betty, who is one of my best friends here, began reporting that Don was getting more and more difficult to live with. He was hypercritical, she said, not just critical. He would do things out of the blue with no rationale and act offended when she questioned him about them. Well, sure, we all thought. Of course. Don is like that. We figured she was overreacting. Perhaps the long Wisconsin winters were fueling cabin fever. He'd always been headstrong. When we hung out with them, he didn't seem any different to us. He had a cantankerous side, and we had just learned to accept it. But Betty's complaints and worries grew louder and more baroque as the months went past. "He's driving me crazy," she'd exclaim. And we'd reply inwardly, silently, "'Driving'? If I were you, it'd be more like 'He's driven me crazy.'" Such thoughts were always followed, in my mind at least, by a reminder that love is stronger than basalt or corundum. The gerund was likely an appropriate part of speech given the affection between them.

About a year and a half ago, maybe two years now--time, like radio waves, is strange up here in the hills--she and Don went to a doctor to see if there might be some biological basis to what Betty perceived as a serious behavioral and cognitive problem. They returned sober and shaken. Don either had early-onset Alzheimer's disease (he was 53 at the time) or something like it, and subsequent tests revealed the culprit to be Pick's disease.

We were all shocked. Betty, not Don, had been right. His forebrain was shrinking like a raisin and not getting sweeter in the process. That part of his anatomy in whose curls and whorls lay the essence of Don-ness was disappearing, atrophying. We were told to expect him to grow confused and scattered. His memory would lose its edge and dissipate. He would exhibit inappropriate behaviors and say the wrong things to the wrong person at the wrong time, a chilling thought. The disease was progressive and ultimately terminal, Betty told us. He might have ten more years of life, but his mental decline would play out well before that.

Like the malady itself, our recognition of it was slow but sure in its flowering. Don stopped finding fault with everything. Whereas a trip to the Chinese restaurant in Platteville had almost always involved him striding into the kitchen to upbraid the staff about cold rice or bland hot-and-sour soup, he now declared everything to be perfect. He smiled more. He joked as well as he could, given his decreased attention span. I tried to imagine what it would be like to have Pick's disease myself; I hoped I wouldn't choose to blow my brains out if it struck me. But then I realized God's grace in the situation: That which would have told Don that he was losing his personality, his critical faculties, and his piercing intelligence was none other than that which was being taken from him. The illness came with its own anaesthetic. And he began to laugh at himself; enough of him was left to recognize that most nouns had fled him in advance of nightfall, leaving him with only pronouns. "That thing . . . you know, that thing . . . it's . . . there," he'd sputter, waving his hands and giggling as he tried to convey an idea to us. We, not he, had to figure out what he meant, and decorum forced us to grin and chuckle along with him. A TV show? A farmer neighbor bringing in the cows? Thanksgiving turkeys on sale? No one could tell.

Betty says she is in denial, even though they have been to the Mayo Clinic and gotten new, experimental drugs that might slow the wasting of Don's frontal lobes. His IQ is now no more than 60 and dropping every day. The doctors have advised him not to drive, but he does anyway, and we all fear that some day their prohibition will be granted an objective correlative as he forgets what red means or that the double yellow line can be the demarcation between this life and the next. He's selling Christmas trees again, and we wonder just how the books will work out. He had always hand-painted his own signs directing folks up the hill to the plots of Frasier firs and Scotch pines, immaculately lettered and imaged works of art; we drove up to visit Betty one Saturday afternoon two weeks ago and found a crudely splattered sign that read GREN at the bottom of the driveway. What did that mean? Green? Who knew? His next attempt was a little better, and we found the previous year's signs in storage and put them up for him the next day. Betty says she's in denial, but I thought that denial was something you erected as a bulwark against the awful-yet-not-too-obvious truth: the tumor you couldn't feel yet, the IRS audit that was scheduled for next week, the relationship that was about to end, in fire or ice, unbeknownst to one of the partners. Don was far too solid and clueless to be denied.

When explaining what's happening to Don, I use the metaphor of radio. It's as if Don is a receiver, and he's moving inexorably out of range of WDON. The signals come in strong, then weak, less strong, and even weaker, fluttering and waffling with the vagaries of the ionosphere. Occasionally, flashes of the old Don spark through the speaker. I was describing to him a friend's plans for Halloween and trying to put my belief that they were wildly optimistic in polite terms.

"I think he's being . . . um . . . ."

"Sanguine?" grinned Don.

"Yes, exactly, sanguine," I replied, regarding the twinkle in Don's eye and hoping I'd see it at least a few more times. But his gaze grows increasingly vegetative and happy and complacent. The volcano is no longer angry. And the once fiery music and oratory of WDON become ever fainter, ever more muffled with static, as the days and nights run past us on their errands. Seeing Don lose his signal makes me glad that mine isn't strong enough to divine just what those errands are all the time. Surely if his had been, he'd never had had the balls to be who he was, I think. Or maybe he'd have been even more of a hellraiser, knowing that his show would end all too soon in dead air.

 

© 2000 Gregor Everitt