On the morning of June 28, 2008, the telephone jolted Nan Griswold awake. A former neighbor was on the other end. He hated to be the one to tell her -- her old house was on fire.
Nan hung up the phone. Her husband, George, was still asleep beside her. Still, Nan waited. How, she wondered, am I going to tell him?
By the time that he was awake and they were dressed and in George's SUV, 45 minutes had passed. The street was blocked off, a chaotic tangle of fire trucks and firefighters surrounded the Griswolds' house on Claridge Circle. They had moved out and were planning to sell it. Now, it was smoldering.
As Nan stood back and watched the firefighters work, as she talked to neighbors, she watched George wander from their old yard to a neighbor's. He didn't pepper the firefighters with questions. He didn't come and put his arm around her. He hadn't hurried her out of the house, leading the charge.
"In a sense, he was in own world," Nan said.
People said that George was the same. Nan knew that he wasn't. She knew that Alzheimer's wasn't just changing George. It was changing their marriage.
An intelligent man
George Griswold lived through his mind and his intellect.
He regularly read three newspapers, plus Time, BusinessWeek, Fortune and Newsweek. He loved debate and banter about politics and economics. When Nan came home in the evenings from her high-stress job as the executive director of the Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest North Carolina, George was her sounding board, helping her untangle problems when she'd had a hard day.
He looked for beauty, too, painting watercolors and oils, mainly landscapes and tall, elegant sailing ships. He loved words and language, seasoning his English with phrases in French, German and Spanish. "C'est la vie," he would say. That's life.
By the time that the Griswolds first visited Dr. Chip Celestino in August 2006, they were worried about George's memory.
He had been having trouble doing the tasks that Nan depended on him to do: Pay the bills and manage their finances, notice that the gutters needed cleaning or that the house needed painting. His office had gotten messy. He stopped cleaning the little stone pond in their backyard, the place where he raised snails and grew water lilies. Her meticulous, fastidious George was getting older, Nan thought. It happens to everyone.
But she noticed other things, too.
George stopped reading novels, spy thrillers by Tom Clancy and other favorite authors. He gave up tai chi, something that he had done most mornings for 10 years. The pieces that made him a person were flaking away.
He had started calling checks "the green papers," as if he had simply lost the word. The phone was "the camera." So was the television remote. That worried Nan: George was a writer and a reader.
Celestino, a family doctor at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center specializing in geriatrics, thought that Nan and George's worries were worth checking out. He gave George a short test to judge his memory, attention and other cognitive skills. George didn't do well.
Celestino recommended that George take a more involved exam with a psychologist. Cecile Naylor, a professor at WFU's School of Medicine who specializes in neuropsychological assessment, saw George in October 2007.
Celestino talked to them about the results -- George had done poorly on that test, too. Celestino suspected dementia. "Do you mean Alzheimer's?" Nan asked. She knew it was a possibility. One in eight people over 65 has Alzheimer's; the greatest risk factor is simply growing older.
Celestino told her yes.
Nan went into what she calls "conflict mode."
She decided they would sell their house and move to Salemtowne, a retirement community near Wake Forest University. George and Nan had discussed downsizing before.
At Salemtowne, they could rent a two-bedroom cottage. They wouldn't have to worry about maintenance or lawn care. There were people their own age around, and if George got bad enough that she couldn't care for him at home, there was an Alzheimer's unit within the community's assisted-living facility right down the street.
She bought books for them to read. The title of one scared her in particular, a book called A Curious Kind of Widow: Loving a Man With Advanced Alzheimer's. She let it sit unopened.
Looking for peace, not love, at a retreat
Nan wasn't looking for love when she met George. She was looking for peace.
It was 1991, and she was on a four-month sabbatical from her job as director of the food bank. In October, she decided to go on a weeklong retreat to Kanuga, the Episcopal conference center in Hendersonville.
The retreat included classes, and she decided to try one in watercolors. She couldn't help but notice the dapper, white-haired man in a turtleneck and tweed jacket who smiled at her when she went to the back of the room to get more paint. He had happy, gray-blue eyes. He was a deft painter, one of the best in the class.
The next morning, Nan wandered the dining hall, looking for a new seat to eat breakfast. She had been table-hopping, and so far, had been a little bored at the other ones. She stopped at a table with two empty seats, asked if she could sit down. "That's George's seat," they told her.
Who, Nan thought, is this George?
He was the man in the tweed jacket. He walked up with a bowl of oatmeal. And that was the beginning. The rest of the week the two of them spent a lot of time together. They took walks. One night, they went into Asheville to get dinner.
George was retired from a career in public relations, marketing, writing and real-estate development. He lived in Hilton Head, S.C. Later, he leased a condo in Lake Norman so he and Nan could spend weekends together.
They were married a year and a half later, on April 3, 1993. George proposed to Nan in his typical low-key, wry way. He didn't ask her to marry him. Rather, he gave her an emerald and diamond ring on a trip to San Francisco. He called it a small token of his affection.
"What hand should I wear it on?" she asked. "Your left," he told her.
George was 74. Nan was 44. He was a transplanted New Englander, a prep school and Yale University graduate with three grown daughters, and friends and family scattered across the country. Nan was born in Statesville, a doctor's daughter and debutante who went to Wake Forest University, stayed in touch with high-school friends her whole life and never lived outside North Carolina. He had been married twice before. She had always been single.
People asked her about the age difference. Nan didn't care. She was determined to follow her heart. "I asked for God to give us five good years together," she said.
George did think about it. He didn't want to be a burden on Nan. He didn't tell her about it at the time, but he took out long-term care insurance should he need to go into a nursing home or hire outside care to come in.
They visited China, Japan and Korea, Paris, Bermuda and, New York. Nan taught George how to shag. George taught Nan about art and photography.
For anniversaries, Valentine's Day and birthdays, George wasn't satisfied with giving Nan just one card. He would get her six.
2008, a year of testing for the Griswolds
Last year tested the Griswolds.
They moved to Salemtowne in May, but there were still some things -- clothes, Christmas decorations, documents and photos -- in the old house. Then there was the fire, part of that old life going up in smoke and fire.
In July, Nan tripped and fractured her ankle and two leg bones. By the fall, she decided to retire from the food bank, earlier than she had planned. She had worked there for 26 years. It was time to put herself and George first.
By January 2009, George and Nan were trying to settle into their new home.
Traces of the past year's turmoil surrounded them. There were boxes of documents saved from the fire under the carport outside that needed to be sorted, clothing that still needed to be taken to consignment shops.
At times, George seemed to enjoy their new house. But then he'd complain about feeling bored and lonely in a new neighborhood, and at a loss over what to do about his disease.
He has some other problems -- hypertension, a history of prostate and kidney cancer, but physically, his health is stable.
He wondered why he wasn't seeing doctors for Alzheimer's. He wanted to know how he had "caught" the disease. "Everything is different. Everything is less," he said.
"I'm not accustomed to things knocking me down. I'm not moving toward anything, achieving anything that I would be proud of."
"What, can't they do something?" he asked Nan.
The answer was harsh -- at 89, he was too old for many studies that Nan looked into. And though he was taking medication -- Namenda and Aricept, standard drugs used for Alzheimer's, as well as an antidepressant -- it was hard to tell if they were helping. Alzheimer's drugs currently available treat the disease's symptoms, but don't reverse or stop its progression. And they don't work for everyone.
George knew that his mind was slowly dying. He has always confronted problems with rationale and research. Now, it frustrated him that there was little he could do.
He was all too aware of what was happening, but he drifted between articulating it while his grasp on basic facts of his life slipped away.
"My world has been turned upside down," he said one winter morning as he and Nan sat in the living room.
He paused and suddenly changed the subject.
"My children all live in North Carolina.''
Nan looked over at him. "Your children? Where does Mimi live?''
"My children all live far away. I haven't seen them in a very long time.''
"September," Nan reminded him. It was a visit to Tracy's house in Colorado. It was then the family asked George to stop driving.
"I don't know. I've got a whole bunch of them."
"You have three girls. Tracy's the oldest, Mimi's in the middle. Abby is the youngest."
Nan felt she wasn't doing enough. At the same time, she felt the burden of doing everything for both of them. She would ask George to take out the trash, explaining each step, only to have to do it all over again the next time. It was easier to just take it out herself.
George misplaced the Christmas gifts he bought Nan. He forgot the password to his e-mail account and lost his wallet. Meanwhile, Nan felt like she was losing George. She grieved for her husband even as he still slept next to her in bed and sat next her in the car.
There could be good days, days when George was his witty and sharp old self, when he seemed to recognize old friends as well as family.
In March, George celebrated his 90th birthday with a big party. Friends and family filled a community room at Salemtowne. Mimi came from Colorado with some of George's grandchildren. Nan put her hand on his shoulder as "Happy Birthday" rang through the big, sunshine-filled room.
"I'm awfully glad to see all these people," he said, beaming, then bending down to blow out the candles on his cake.
George rattled by noise and strangers
By the spring, Nan could tell George had gotten worse.
Noise rattled him. Television commercials irritated him. So did crowds. Sometimes he points at strangers, or starts singing in public.
One afternoon, he and Nan went to Mayberry's Restaurant for lunch. Four women chatted loudly at the table behind them.
"What are those cackling hens doing back there?" George said in disgust.
"George," Nan warned him, "lower your voice."
It's the Alzheimer's talking, she thought, checking her patience. It's not him.
She has to remind herself of this often -- when George asks the same question again and again; when he insists that she's gone through his things. He wanted to go swimming recently and she took his swimming trunks out so that he could pick out his favorite. He insisted that he had taken them out, not her. She didn't argue. She's learned to drop it. Or she gets out of the house by running an errand or calling her best friend.
In May, George and Nan went to the bank together to deposit some of George's investment checks. Nan thought it was something that would empower him, putting his own money in the bank. She turned each check over and asked him to sign them. Then Nan took them back to enter the amount on the deposit slip so that she could put the money in their joint account.
George started to get irritated. "This is my money," he said. "I want it in my account."
He continued to fume after Nan took the checks to the teller. "I can't believe you're doing this to me," he told her in the car. "I never thought I'd see the day that you'd be like this. You are just cruel."
Nan drove, sad and hurt inside. George had never spoken to her that way. She told him she was sorry.
It is hard to know what do for George, and it is getting harder. He bristles at the loss of his independence while she is less willing to leave him alone.
Nan had a metal bracelet made for George, with his name and "Alzheimer's patient" on one side, her name and their address and phone numbers on the other. She has taken over their finances, stumbles through computer problems with their laptops and does all the driving. She's tried to write down appointments and plans in calendars and a dry erase board in their den, though that doesn't seem to stop George from asking what they're doing each day, over and over.
She sorts his pajamas, socks and sweaters into piles by his side of their bed so that he can easily find them and not go through dresser drawers. She is the planner and the scheduler, cook and chauffeur, secretary, wife and mother.
In February, she realized that she would have to remind George to buy her roses for Valentine's Day. She ended up buying them herself, a soft pink bouquet that she put on the dining-room table.
Being single for 44 years, she says, doesn't make it easier. She had 16 years of marriage to get used to being one half of a team.
At times, when they are lying in bed at night, George will reach over and grab her hand. Then she knows he is still there -- her husband.
Things have improved in some ways. Nan's church, St. Paul's Episcopal, put her in touch with a man who comes a few days a week to take George to exercise, to doctor appointments and to lunch. She talks to a counselor once a week. She has her faith, too, and has started reading prayers at night.
The Griswolds added two family members this spring when they adopted a couple of cats, Maggie and Gracie. They already had one, Grizzie. To George, they're all Grizzie. "They're walking away from me, so they all look the same until they turn around," he explains with a slight smile.
This summer, George was accepted into an Alzheimer's study at Wake Forest. It gave the Griswolds hope. If it doesn't help George, he and Nan hope it will help others.
Though she's scared of him dying suddenly and leaving her alone, there are things that frighten her more. She might have to move him into assisted living. He might forget who she is. He might lose not only basics such as dressing and feeding himself, but also the grace she fell in love with, her dignified, kind-hearted George.
But that's not today.
This is right now, when the Griswolds still have memories they can share, favorite stories to tell over and over again: The man in the tweed jacket, painting watercolors and the blond, outgoing woman who sat down at his breakfast table one morning.
"We had five beautiful days at Kanuga," Nan says.
"I didn't count them," George says, looking at her, "and they didn't end."
â– Laura Giovanelli can be reached at 727-7302 or at lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com
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