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

35 Years, 3 Months and 15 Minutes

By Bud Focht

Hi, my name is Bud and I think it was Andy Warhol who back in the 60s said something about “Everyone is famous for 15 minutes.”  Now that I am in my 60s I recently had my 15 minutes.

They say things happen in threes, so any day now I am expecting Hell to freeze over and pigs to begin flying. The third thing already happened.

A few weekends ago I was inducted into the Rider University Athletics Hall of Fame, and was also given a Lifetime Achievement Award from CoSIDA (College Sports Information Directors of America) at the national convention in Orlando.

My local newspaper in Bucks County, PA and the local paper that covers Rider in Mercer County, NJ, both had very flattering stories about it.

Two tremendous honors. If only I could say that I deserved them.

My wife Terry and I usually spend our Friday evenings watching a “cross-over” musical concert on TV, with two or more bands from different genres playing songs together. Like Zac Brown, Beethoven and the Beatles.

Tonight, we are currently watching R&B/Jazz group Earth, Wind & Fire playing with Country Music headliners like Darius Rucker, Martina McBride, Dan + Shay and Lady Antebellum. Terry loves “Hootie”, “Lady A” and just about every country band and I had a shoulder-width afro in the 70s, so I can appreciate Earth, Wind & Fire’s “funky groove.”

A few minutes ago when they introduced Earth, Wind & Fire as Rock and Roll Hall of Famers Terry turned to me and said “You’re a hall of famer. You’re my hall of famer.”

That was nice.

After 35 years and three months of working as an administrator in a Division I Athletics program, I took an early retirement in the fall of 2016.  I had planned on working another four or five more years, but I received a higher calling.

I quit the job that I loved to become a fulltime caregiver for my wife Terry, who is in the middle stages of Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease and since last fall, I am afraid, needs 24-hour-a-day assistance.

I was on the very first Hall of Fame committee at Rider and everyone since then, except for the last one. And apparently, I can’t leave these committee people alone for one meeting without them violating the bylaws and selecting someone who was not even on the ballot. And I know I wasn’t on the ballot because I am the one who prepared the ballot for the committee before I quit my job.

Part of my job was researching candidates for the Hall of Fame, making a list of their greatest accomplishments/achievements and putting them on the ballot, seven years after they graduate. That’s probably the main reason why I wasn’t on the ballot. A major lack of great accomplishments/achievements.

I mean I was pretty good in high school, but who wasn’t? In college, that was another story. One time my sophomore year I was looking at the line up on the dugout wall before the game and saw that I was batting ninth. Again.

In high school, I always batted fourth. In college, the first few times I batted ninth I was just happy to be in the lineup but after a while I was beginning to lose my confidence. So I went up to the head coach and said “Skip, what is the main reason why I’m batting ninth?” And the head coach said, “Because, Bud, there isn’t a 10^th.”

What a confidence boost that was!

Don’t get me wrong, he was always behind me. He would always give me the same advice every time I batted, so I always had the same approach at the plate. He would say “Bud, swing hard in case you hit it.”

So this year the Rider HOF committee not only selected someone who, for good reason, was not on the ballot but they also violated the bylaws by waiving the seven-year wait.

That was for Terry.

They bypassed the seven-year rule because they wanted to do it while Terry would still be able to appreciate what was going on. And she did. She had a great evening. My closest friends were there and when we (our three kids, one of Terry’s brothers and his wife) arrived and walked in to the crowded cocktail hour Terry saw a couple of familiar faces in the crowd and just smiled ear to ear. That set the tone for a great evening.

There are over 100 people in the Rider Athletics Hall of Fame and over the years I dealt with almost every one of them, so I know that I don’t deserve to be in such great company. At least not yet.  You see there are a handful of people in the Rider Hall that are in there more for what they did AFTER Rider than what they did AT Rider.

In the Rider Hall there is a baseball player who was pretty good at Rider but not great. Never a Player of the Year or even a First Team All-League selection. But he was good enough to get drafted and he eventually made it all the way to the Major Leagues.

He reached the highest level of his profession after Rider, and that is why he is in the Rider Hall of Fame.

There was a Rider basketball player who, in his bio, we generously referred to as a “sixth man” but he was more like an “eighth” or “ninth man.” He didn’t play that much, but he had a very high basketball IQ. As a grad. assistant coach he did the scouting report and drew up the game plan for one of Rider’s biggest upset victories ever over a nationally ranked team. He went on to be a highly successful college coach at a high-profile program and went on to be a college basketball analyst on national TV.

He reached the highest level of his profession after Rider, and that is why he is in the Rider Hall of Fame.

I’m thinking that if I can do what that baseball player and that basketball player did, reach the highest level of my profession after Rider, then I might deserve such an honor as the Rider Hall of Fame.

I loved my job at Rider. I love my new profession as a caregiver for the most important person in my life.

If I can become the best caregiver there is, then maybe I will earn those 15 minutes I recently enjoyed.

Even though I played varsity baseball in college, Terry was always the athlete of our family, and our sports backgrounds are now coming into play.

Every day we are in the back yard having a catch. (Non-ballplayers say ‘play’ catch. ballplayers say ‘have a’ catch because they don’t ‘play’ catch, they ‘play’ baseball.)

Somewhere I found this perfect nerf ball, that is heavy enough that you can throw it 100 feet accurately, but light enough where you can catch it with your bare hands and even though it is bigger than a baseball it is smaller than a softball.

Having a catch makes Terry laugh every time, and if one of her favorite songs comes on the radio while we are throwing the ball around she starts dancing. Her eye-hand coordination is so good that she makes great catches and it makes her so happy.

Being able to do things well, anything well, is a dim and distant memory for Terry.  I discovered that having a catch is good therapy for her. It makes her feel good, and knowing that I came up with something that makes her feel good makes me feel like maybe I can become a Hall of Fame caregiver.

Until next time, like Andy Warhol said, “They say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”

Bud

Satan, Your Mama and Me

By Bud Focht

Hi, my name is Bud and I feel like I am about to begin earning my keep.

I’ve been a caregiver for almost four years now, the last eight months on a full-time, 24-hour-a-day basis, and it is beginning to get challenging.

At first, it sucked. But it was manageable. My wife Terry, who is now in the middle stages of  Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease, was still able to do most things, many things, okay, some things, on her own.

But lately, the gauntlet seems to have been thrown down. Hard! And I know exactly who threw it down. The Great Deceiver. Mephistopheles. The Devil.

When I first became a caregiver, I could deal with the decline of Terry’s cognitive skills. And once I took an early retirement so I could be with Terry all of the time, I could explain things to her. I could help her do everything. I could finally, with complete confidence, tell her that I know what is best for everyone. Or at least what is best for her.

But now, I am afraid, because of this god-damn disease, Terry’s personality is beginning to change. And that is hard to take. I guess it might be like when a guy marries a girl only for her looks and then her looks begin to fade.  Fast. Like she gains 100 pounds and her face begins to look like it belongs in a Picasso painting.

Or a woman who marries a guy for his money and he turns out to be a Bernie Madoff. As in he ‘made off’ with all your money.

Surprisingly, some of Terry’s personality changes are okay.

When I recently told Terry that her beloved Red Sox won again, she said “Great! They are my Peeps.”  I had to clean up the coffee I spit out onto the kitchen floor. The last time Terry said ‘peeps’ it was 1990-something and she was putting those yellow marshmallow chicks into the kids’ Easter baskets.

One of Terry’s favorite country music groups is Florida Georgia Line, and they sing a song called “God, Your Mama and Me.” As in no one can love you more than God, your mama and me.

Terry was getting her words mixed up again and couldn’t say the words to the song. When this happens I usually say it over and over to her and she tries to repeat. When I would say “God, your mama” she would say “God, my mama.” We kept on going back and forth “Your mama.” “My mama.”  I tried to get her by saying “Mars, Uranus” but then she figured out what she was doing. Our daughter was enjoying it, laughing, and was wishing she had taped it for America’s Funny Home Videos.

But some of Terry’s personality changes are NOT okay. As far as how days start, I recently had one that could have been a bit better.

Terry usually gets up in the morning around 9:30. The other day she woke up at 7:30 for a bathroom break and when we returned to bed she said she was hungry. When I tried to convince her to go back to sleep and wait an hour or two, she lashed out. My experience of being her caregiver has taught me that the later she sleeps the more “with it” (for lack of a better expression) she is. When I was still working she would sometimes sleep till noon. I would get her up when I came home at lunchtime.

So when she told me at 7:30 that she was hungry, I told her to go back to sleep. That is when she yelled that she hates me and then she hit me.

Good morning to you too!

I realize it was not her, it was this god-damn disease, but still. To hear the person you feed, shower and dress yell at you like that and actually strike you, it is a small taste of hell.

I have been a long-time believer in divine intervention. But I am also a big believer in just the opposite kind of intervention.

Ever since Terry got deeply involved with her Bible Study group, she has had several different health issues. The more often they (thyroid, hiatal hernia, Alzheimer’s) occurred and the more Terry studied the Bible the more apparent it became to both of us.

Many scoff at the idea that Satan exists, and that he has his hands in our everyday life. To some, Satan is a fictional character of novels, video games and horror movies. 

About 43 years ago during Senior Week at the Jersey Shore I saw a new horror movie called The Exorcist with six of the toughest guys I went to high school with the first rainy night we were there and none of us could sleep without a light on the rest of the week.

If you believe in God, then you have to believe in Satan. And if you believe that through prayer that the “man upstairs” can provide help, then you have to believe that the “man downstairs”, the devil, is using his influence as well. It is not as if once he talked Eve into eating the forbidden fruit he just slithered off. That is where he just got his start.

Reba McEntire has a song out now called Back to God, as in we have to give this world back to God. Sorry, Reba. I am afraid it is a little too late. I am afraid this world belongs to Satan. Look at the facts.

War. Injustice. Trump. (was that redundant?)

Against my better judgement I recently took Terry on a road trip to visit her mother. Don’t get me wrong. For 35 years I have enjoyed taking Terry and our kids to visit Terry’s childhood home. Sorry, no mother-in-law jokes here. I have the greatest mother-in-law in the world. She wanted to see Terry and Terry always loves seeing her. Plus all five of Terry’s sisters were in town so it was a great opportunity. I figured the ever-increasing hassle of traveling with Terry would be worth it. And it was. The trip was great! No major problems at all.

Until we got home. I guess it was the lack of a routine, but Terry began imagining things and insisting that she saw and did things that were not happening. And she was having outbursts of anger, something she has never done in her life.

So this is when the men get separated from the boys. No longer am I just trying to help Terry understand what is going on. I am now dealing with hallucinations, fits of rage, severe mood swings.

When the kids were little and they would get a scrape, a bump or a bruise, before they would start to cry I would always say “It’s a good thing you’re tough!” and they would always try to act tough and maybe not cry.

Until next time, it is a good thing I am tough.

Bud

budfocht@gmail.com

Guardian Angels, Fairies and Phenomena

By Bud Focht

Hi, my name is Bud and while staying up late to watch the ball game from the West Coast I just saw 12:34 on the clock. That is something I have been doing way too much of lately, and I believe it is some sort of phenomenon. What kind of phenomenon, however, I am not sure.

Like in the movie, Phenomenon, the science fiction theory is always more interesting than the scientific one.

In the movie, John Travolta’s character, George Malley, thought he saw a bright light coming from the sky and soon afterward his mind began to expand. He was able to read and comprehend at a super-human rate and even began to possess telekinetic abilities. The towns people thought he was subject to an alien encounter but in reality, it was a brain tumor that had “awoken” parts of his brain that most humans don’t use. The movie plays on the myth about people only using 10 percent of their brain.

Back to my phenomenon.

In the late 1990s I went through a period of a few years when I would see 11:11 on the clock ALL the time. I mean like seven or eight times a week.

At first I thought it was just muscle memory, getting into a subconscious habit of looking at the clock at the same time every day and night.

But with my cell phone, the clock in my car, the clock on my computer, the clock on my desk phone, the clock on the microwave, the clock on the VCR, the bedroom clock, and the clock on my office wall being about as synchronized as John Blutarsky’s (Bluto) when the Delta Tau Chi frat boys were planning their revenge at the Faber College homecoming parade, there were days when I saw 11:11 three different times on three different clocks.

I had a feeling this meant something, but what, I had no idea. I never told anyone, fearing they would think I was full of it or give me some reasonable explanation. But it happened SO often that I knew there was no reasonable explanation.

Something was up.

Then one day my oldest daughter was talking to her younger sister and she said that her friend claims she sees 11:11 on the clock all the time.

I was shocked! Are there others out there? Were we going to start sculpting the Devil’s Tower in our mashed potatoes?

I didn’t see it but I read where they even made a movie a few years ago about seeing 11:11 all the time, called I Origins.

When I heard my daughter’s friend was seeing it, I did something that, 17 years later, I would have done right away. I looked it up on the Internet. Apparently, it is some form of phenomenon with many opinions on what it means.

Some say it was my “guardian angel” looking after me. Some say it is fairies or some other sort of “spirit guides” who are just letting me know they are there to help me.

Regardless of what it does or does not mean, once I looked it up, saw some of the explanations, and found out that this happens to many people, it stopped happening to me. Boom, just like that, it stopped.

However, a few years ago, before my wife Terry was diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease, I began seeing 12:34 and 1:23 on the clock. A lot. Like, way more than I should. It was the 11:11 phenomenon all over again.

I read that seeing 11:11 is the universe’s way of urging us to pay attention to our heart, our soul and our inner intuition. It’s serving as a wake-up call to us so that opportunities are not missed in this lifetime.

But what the level-headed, practical person inside of me thinks is that it is a different kind of phenomenon, called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. The “BM” phenomenon, which I like to call it, (sorry, immature humor is still humor to me), basically states that you look at the clock hundreds of times a day and if you see 12:57 or 9:04, it means little to you, (unless you were supposed to be somewhere at 1 o’clock or at 9 o’clock), but 12:34 is interesting because of the numbers being in order, so your mind remembers that. I could just as easily be seeing 9:04 just as often as 11:11 or 12:34 and just not realize it.

The scientific explanation is not as fun as the science fiction one, and I sorta wish it was a guardian angel or fairies looking after me. Lately, I could use their help.

Patience has never been one of my strong suits.  As a matter of fact, it is probably the weakest suit I have, almost as weak as the suit with the Nehru jacket I owned when I was in the seventh grade. (what was I thinking?)

I thought I began to learn patience when my wife Terry was first diagnosed and I became her caregiver. Her loss of cognitive skills caused me to be more patient as I had to learn to help her with everything she does.  But lately I have been losing my patience more frequently, getting frustrated when she can no longer take any direction at all.

I am not sure why. Whether it be her continued decline, my frustration with dealing with that, or my recent lack of self-medicating (not even on April 20).  But for whatever reason, I have been short with Terry lately, snapping at her when she cannot do what I instruct her to do (rinse the shampoo out of your hair, put your shoes on, laugh at my jokes).

When our kids were small and they would/could not follow directions, I would often get frustrated with them and yell at them. Terry would ask me to be more patient with them but my philosophy was that if I didn’t get terse with them they wouldn’t learn and the lack of following directions would continue longer.

But things are just the opposite with Terry. She is not going to learn from my snapping at her. She is not going to learn ANYTHING. She is forgetting. EVERYTHING. We can have a conversation with someone who Terry loves, and five minutes later she will not remember who we were talking to.

I need my guardian angel to look over my shoulder. I need the fairies to shut my mouth when I begin to get angry with Terry. Because it is not Terry I am getting angry with, it is her condition. Her god-damn disease. And dealing with it for almost four years now is beginning to get to me.

But when I see 11:11 or 12:34 or 1:23 on the clock, it does remind me that I need to take a step back. To realize that there is going to be a time in the not too distant future that things are going to be much worse than they are now. And that helps me handle the latest situation that had me frustrated.

Maybe it is my guardian angel after all.

Until next time, when you see 11:11 on 12:34 on the clock, think about what the fairies are trying to tell you.

Bud 

For Whom the Bell Tolls

By Bud Focht

Hi, my name is Bud and I have been thinking too much about death lately.  Fun stuff, I know.

No, I don’t have a death anxiety. I am not in constant fear of my own death. I don’t really even think about my own death that much. No more than anyone else.

But a childhood friend of mine died the other day. He wasn’t a close friend, but someone I was on a couple of all-star baseball teams with when we were kids. But he was my age.

And I’m not that old.

Maybe when I was 50 years old I thought 60 was old. I know when I was 30 I thought 40 was old, and when I was 45 I knew 55 was old.  I guess 10 years older than what you are is as good a definition of ‘old’ as any. Although I recently learned a new one.

Due to my wife Terry’s extremely short attention span these days, we watch a lot of funny videos. No plot to remember, just slapstick comedy. From watching these videos, I have learned a new definition of old.

If you fall down and everyone laughs, you are not old. If you fall down and people cringe, gasp and start dialing 9-1-1, you are old.

I am afraid that, even if I am not old, I am now at the age where not only are most of the parents of my childhood friends passing away, but even some of my friends themselves are. Or at least people my age are.  They are beginning to fall to the wayside at a rate all too often.

I was looking at some old photos recently and I saw a team picture of a championship squad I played on in the early 1980s. Three people in the pix of about 20 are already dead.

And it is sad.

A long time ago when Terry first started really studying the Bible she used to tell me that when we are done with this world there will be a new system and that we will then live in a perfect world.

Several years later when she was diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease, she told me that, because of her faith, her beliefs, she was not afraid.

Well, I sure as hell was, and still am. Very afraid.

Back in the early 1980s I traveled to Oklahoma for a basketball game and we faced a player named Wayman Tisdale. He went on to the pros (second player picked in the NBA draft after hall of famer Patrick Ewing) and later became a successful jazz guitarist. He had a Magic Johnson type of personality on the court and on the stage, always happy and smiling.

As a musician, Tisdale became friends with country singer Toby Keith. When Tisdale passed away at the age of 44 after losing a leg to cancer, Keith wrote a song, a tribute to his friend, called Cryin’ for Me. In the song he says that “I’m not cryin’ cause I feel so sorry for you. I’m cryin’ for me.”

That’s how I feel. When people I know or relatives of people I know pass away, I don’t feel sad for the people who die. I feel sad for the people who are left behind. They are the ones who are now hurting.

And I don’t want to be that person who is left behind, that person hurting. Alzheimer’s.org, however, along with the statistics and the doctors, say that I am going to be that person.

I always kid Terry that the song by The Band Perry, Better Dig Two, is about us. That when one of us goes the other one is going too.   She can’t live without my help in everything she does, and I can’t imagine living without her.

They say you can’t take it with you. Well, we plan on taking each other with us. But then again, you know how plans go.

You read about that happening all of the time. Someone dies and a day or two later their spouse of 50 years also dies. It happened in February to a couple who I grew up down the street from. People actually can die of a broken heart. Back in December Debbie Reynolds died just a day or two after her daughter Carrie Fisher died.

And for those who do survive their partner’s death, often their quality of life is never the same.

That is what scares me about death.

In high school, they made us read. The bastards! I mean, in high school they made us read. Thank God! But at least they let us pick our poison.  I mean they let us pick our favorite authors. Two of the authors on the list were Ernest Hemingway and Charles Dickens.

Hemingway seemed interesting, but he blew his own head off with a shot gun. I chose Dickens because I thought he had a really cool beard (yes, I was very mature for my age in high school), plus he was English and at that time I was still a victim of the British Invasion (Beatles, Stones, pre-disco BeeGees).

In The Old Curiosity Shop Dickens wrote “Death doesn’t change us more than life.”  I am not sure if I agree with that statement, but I do share some of his thoughts.

Lately when people ask me how my “retirement” is going, I feel like saying “It is the best of times, it is the worst of times.”

It is the best of times because I get to spend all day hanging out with Terry. It is the worst of times because of the circumstances. Because of why I am hanging out with my wife all day.

We haven’t exactly been lighting up the social calendar with excursions like many young retired couples do. Many days Terry doesn’t even want to leave the house, but I am sure that will change now that the weather is warming up. But sometimes I feel like I am wasting this opportunity.  Sometimes I feel useless, not being able to work or do things.

But Dickens also wrote that “No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.”

That’s my job now. To lighten Terry’s burden. Help her function day-in and day-out. Help her laugh every day.

“There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor,” Dickens wrote.

Good humor. Now I am no longer thinking about death. Now I’m craving ice cream.

Until next time, enjoy the next 10 years before you too are old.

Bud

budfocht@gmail.com

Center of Attention

By Bud Focht

Hi, my name is Bud and I used to write a weekly blog.  I used to do a lot of things.

With Spring Training baseball games on television now it makes me long for the days when I would go to the Philadelphia Phillies games. For 10 years, a dozen of us had very good seats near each other for about 20 games a year. The fact that in those years the Phils won five Division Titles, two National League Pennants and a World Series, made it even more enjoyable. For a few of those years (2007-09) Citizen’s Bank Park was the place to be in the greater Philadelphia area.

But it wasn’t just good baseball in a nice ball park. It was the comradery of the group of friends tailgating before the game and sitting within ear-shot of each other during the game.

That’s what I miss.

March Madness is about to begin. Last night I watched the conference championship basketball games (women’s and men’s) of the league that I used to work in. But this year I watched it on television instead of in person. The electricity of the crowd being on national TV, the importance of the game, with the loser seeing its outstanding season end while the winner gets the ultimate prize, getting its name on the office pool bracket.

That’s what I miss.

This time of year, I used to work 70 hours a week, but I still had time to do things.

Since I’ve taken an early retirement I have no time to do anything.

That’s what I miss.

For some reason, I had a different idea of what “retirement” would be like.

It seems my wife has gone from a self-sufficient wall flower to someone who seeks my constant attention.  And I am afraid she has begun showing signs of agitation when she doesn’t get it.

I mean I have gotten used to being with her all day to help her with everything, now that Terry is in the middle stages of Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease, and I never once minded it. She’s my partner, and when she needs assistance I WANT to be the person to help her.

But lately she has gotten upset when I tried to have a conversation with someone else. And both times it happened it was a family member I was talking to.

A few months ago we visited her family in New England. Terry’s family is large, with 10 kids, and even now when all are grown, there is usually a large crowd sitting around the dining room table when we visit. And even though they are all sitting around the same large table, there are often two or three different conversations going on at the same time.

The first time I witnessed that I was a little put off. Terry and I had just started dating and it was my second or third time at the house.  I was telling a story and was just about to get to the punch line when one or two of her siblings began their own conversation.

I eventually discovered that it was just the way it is in such a large family. When a parent has to deal with six or seven needy kids at one time, you don’t get center stage unless you are bleeding or puking. Sometimes you need to be doing both if it is flu season.

So a few months ago Terry and I were sitting around that large table along with seven or eight others, and there were a few conversations going on. I was involved in one of them and all of a sudden Terry became upset. It took me a while, in another room, to find out what the problem was.

At first I figured she just couldn’t focus on any of the conversations and she was getting frustrated. And that was part of it.

But then it happened again the other day in our own house. Our daughter was telling me something while Terry was eating her lunch and all of a sudden she got upset. She didn’t like my daughter talking to me. She wanted my attention.

Back in the 1980s Terry was the shyest person I ever dated. When we got married she knew what my job entailed and was fine with me being gone so much.

Now she is an attention hog.

I know it is not her, it is this god-damn disease, that is making her act this way. And it is tough to see.

I’m not sure if I am to blame for this. Do I coddle her too much? Should I try to let her do more things on her own?

This constant need for attention prevents me from doing anything without her. Like talk to my kids or friends. To write this blog. To use the bathroom. I took a shower the other day and when I came out Terry was upset because she didn’t know where I was. And it was just a five-minute shower after I had twice told her what I was going to do.

I always knew things were going to get tougher in this caregiving thing. I tried not to give it much thought, but reality is beginning to sink in.

This gig is not for everybody.

But it is for me. I am so grateful that I was able to quit my job and spend 24/7 with my partner.

I just wish I had some time to do things.

That’s what I miss.

And I know that in the future there are going to be things I miss even more. So even though I just spent the last half hour writing how I miss things, I try not to give it too much thought.

I don’t have the time.

Until next time, appreciate what you have. You’re going to miss this.

Bud