We Be Happy

By Bud Focht

Hi, my name is Bud and I admit I have been guilty of saying “we” when referring to my favorite sports teams.  “We (Rider University Broncs) won today.”  “We (Boston Red Sox) won last night.”  “We (Philadelphia Phillies) lost last night, again.”

“WE WIN!” was a famous headline in the Boston Globe back in the late 1940s (you might have seen it in the 1980s on the beginning of the TV show Cheers) when the New England baseball team (not the American League Red Sox.) won the pennant. Boston had a National League team called the Braves before it moved west to Milwaukee and then south to Atlanta.

I had the opportunity to do the color commentary on a handful of radio broadcasts of several NCAA Division I Baseball Tournaments, and even though I was associated with one of the teams in the games, I tried to stay neutral and refer to the hometown team as “Rider” or “the Broncs,” not “we.”

But I have to admit when things started to get a little exciting I sometimes said “We need to do this,” “We need to do that” or especially “We win!”

I am afraid my wife Terry has taken this ‘We’ thing to a whole new and somewhat unhealthy level.

Terry, now in her late 50s and in the middle stages of Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease, was once a star tennis player. She might have been a ‘big fish in a small pond,’ but she was still a star.

She was the number one singles player all four years for her Division III college team and also played first doubles. She won so many summer city-league tournaments in her small hometown in Rhode Island (is there anything NOT small in Rhode Island?) that she switched over from the women’s to the men’s tournament, where she reached the finals (of 32 players) all three times.

Because of her love for tennis, Wimbledon has always been one of our summer staples. Go to the Shore, watch the movie Jaws, and get up early at the end of the fortnight to watch the Wimbledon finals.

But this year things were different. This year I was retired, having quit my job back in the fall to give Terry the 24-hour-a-day attention she unfortunately now needs. This year I was home the entire fortnight to watch the Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club at Wimbledon.

Thanks to the DVR, we watched the entire first two days of Wimbledon, start to finish, without getting up at 7am and, even better, fast-forwarding through commercials. It was great. Terry was loving it. Until she started to get a little too involved.

When the players Terry and I were rooting for won, whether it was because he or she was American or an underdog or someone we were familiar with, Terry would say “We won!” and get way to excited.

During the second day of Wimbledon I was in the kitchen making Terry her lunch when she started to laugh and say “He’s losing to a girl! He’s losing to a girl!” When I came out expecting to see maybe an upset by a player with long hair, I didn’t. It took me a while to figure it out but the ‘girl’ was Terry.  She honestly believed that she was playing and winning.

After that every match where we had a player who we wanted to win, she became that player, in her mind, man or woman.

I admit I may have, on occasion, lived vicariously through my kids when they enjoyed success, but that was nothing like this.

It got scary, seeing your wife lose her sense of reality. I would say “Hey Ter, Venus won today. We like her.”   Only to hear “I’m better than her. I can beat her.” And she wasn’t kidding. In her mind she thought she could.

This coming from the shyest, most modest athlete I have ever come across. And in my 42 years in college athletics (4 years as a student-athlete, 1 year as a grad. assistant, 2 years as a part-time SID and 35+ years in a D-1 program) I have dealt with over 3,000 college athletes. And not one was ever as unassuming as Terry. The first time I met her I interviewed her after she upset a Division II team’s best player, and she stared at her shoes the entire interview while giving one or two-word answers.

But after the interview she looked me in the eye and smiled and I was hooked.

But this year we had to stop watching Wimbledon after the third round. She got too involved.

I’ve read where hallucinating, or at least losing touch with reality, is part of our future with this horrible disease, but this was our first major run in with it. And it was scary.

Almost as scary as the violent out-bursts.

Chuck Wepner was a Jersey Boy who could take a punch. In 1975 he went the distance with the greatest boxer ever, Muhammad Ali, and that performance inspired Sylvester Stallone to write the movie Rocky.

Wepner was not what would be considered a great fighter, but he could take a punch from the best of them.

With Terry’s recent and more frequent angry, violent out-bursts, Wepner has become a role model of mine.

But I am learning this caregiver thing, slowly but surely. I am learning how to deal with Terry’s bizarre behavior and occasional violence.

Some 300 years ago there was a play (I didn’t see it) with a line that said “Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast.”

No one who ever met Terry would ever associate her in the same sentence or even same paragraph as a savage beast, but I am afraid this horrible disease has done just that.

Ever since Terry was diagnosed she has had somewhat of a soundtrack to her life. We always play music when there is no other stimulus, and even when there is. She likes it and it is good for her. Input.

There is a song we’ve been listening to since we first heard it in May, “Happy People” by Little Big Town. For the past few weeks every time Terry hears it when we are in our back yard she starts to dance. We have video recorded her doing so and sent it to her family to rave reviews.

It is better than any funny cat or epic fail video you have ever seen. It is like what Steve Martin and Willie Nelson both said a long time ago about banjo music, how you can’t play a sad song on the banjo.

Terry can’t be mad, for long, when she hears that song.

I am still learning this caregiver gig, but fortunately I AM learning. The good things to do and the bad things that are happening to Terry’s shrinking brain. The bad things that are happening to us.

Like Wepner, I am learning to take a gut punch. I would have never expected to get one during Wimbledon, but with the help of the proper music, I hope that ‘We’ can win the game.

The set and match, I am afraid, have already been decided.

Like Little Big Town sings, “Life is short, and love is rare, and we all deserve to be happy while we’re here.”

Until next time, We will try to Be Happy People.

Bud

budfocht@gmail.com