On Alzheimer’s and art that heals

My father’s birthday was earlier this month. He would have been 99, but he died from Alzheimer’s disease 11 years ago. I am still re-membering him.

On the day that he died, he looked as rundown and parched as the tiny Nebraska farm he grew up on during the Depression. Just as the dust storms of his youth had stolen the thin, rich topsoil from their farm, so had the quiet storm of Alzheimer’s swept away his best thoughts and dreams from the landscape of memory. Nothing could grow or take root anymore in that barren place, in the drought of his mind.

A week earlier, my two older brothers had called and asked me to come to St. Paul, Minnesota, where they live, and where dad was in a care center. It was time for hospice. My brothers had managed the day-to-day slog of Dad’s mental decline for two years — the maze of doctors and caregivers and meds and how to pay for it all. A few months prior, when Dad escaped his room and locked himself outside in his underwear in a snowy parking lot on a freezing January night, they moved him to a memory unit.

That was a sad place. All the windows were locked and alarmed and the entrance door required a digital code. Without the rudder of memory, my father and the nine residents in his unit all seemed adrift in a tiny boat on a wild, infinite sea — yet unconcerned about finding their way back to shore. Whenever I visited and had dinner with them, I wondered how I appeared to them: a dim light off in the distance toward which they might row for a few seconds? And I wondered what I would do, if it were me, and if I could still decide. That is, if I couldn’t recognize my family or friends, or remember what and who I loved, would I want to keep living?

That’s a question that came bubbling up in me this week when I attended a Buffalo Theater Ensemble production of Bruce Graham’s play, The Outgoing Tide, at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn. The play, which is about a family negotiating the tragedy of an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, is a compelling and moving production. The story includes just three characters, and takes place at a vacation home on Chesapeake Bay. Gunner (Bryan Burke), the father, is happily retired and likes to fish and roam the seashore, but has been forced to confront the reality of his growing dementia. Reluctantly, he slowly begins to accept that his memory is being swept away, and that he, like the tide, is on his way out — for the last time.

Given this debacle, Peg (Connie Canaday Howard), Gunner’s devoted wife of 50 years, and Jack (Nick DuFloth), their troubled, newly divorced son, try to convince him to move to an elder care facility in town. Peg has put them on a waiting list for a memory care unit, but Gunner refuses this option. And when he later considers “Do I want to keep living?” — forever lost in the fog of dementia — he decides no. He will not accept a life of utter dependence, and separation, from his friends and family, and from the life he has already lived, which made him who he is.

In a plot that echoes Death of a Salesman (and Willy Loman’s relationship with Linda and his sons), we eventually learn that Gunner has taken out a life insurance policy, and has another plan. But unlike Miller's play, Graham’s work balances the dark cycles of loss with a significant dose of humor, which is both welcome and necessary, offering viewers flickers of hope. This essential contrast — between the comic and tragic — is only possible due to the emotional complexity and acuity of the acting, to how Peg (Howard) and Gunner (Burke) are able to embody their deeply flawed yet sometimes beautiful marriage and family.

While watching the play I could not help but think of my father, and the seven million other people now diagnosed with Alzheimer’s — and of all their caregivers. Since that 7 million is projected to grow to 13 million cases by 2050, this growing epidemic poses an immense challenge to the health care system, which is why so many people are worried about it. Lately it seems that anyone I talk with — at church or work or in the grocery store — has a family member or friend or treasured colleague who is struggling with dementia. Many of these people are feeling guilt and confusion and regret about how to treat and care for their loved ones. Or, if like me, they have already lost that loved one, they might still be seeking some sense of resolution, or maybe even forgiveness.

All of which suggests why this remarkable production of The Outgoing Tide is so important and timely. The play, which runs through March 3, feels like an invitation to viewers — to find some of their story in Gunner and Peg’s, in their heartache and vulnerability, but also in their humor and resilience. It is a work of art that both entertains and heals.

• Tom Montgomery Fate teaches writing part-time at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, and is the author of six books. The most recent is The Long Way Home, a collection of essays.