Karen Sandler

Tag: alzheimer’s

  • Happy Birthday, Dad

    Today is my dad’s birthday. He would have been 86 today. He died of Alzheimer’s nearly 5 months ago on January 9th. I’d like to share his eulogy today as a way to remember him.

    Great men don’t always become president, or build tall buildings, or run corporations. Sometimes greatness comes from a man’s kindness, his generosity, his good heart. Sam Stier was that kind of man.

    Sam was a loving husband of Barbara, father to four daughters and stepfather to one son, grandfather to nine grandchildren, great-grandfather to five great-grandchildren. He was also a friend to everyone he met. That last is no exaggeration—everyone who met him came to love him.

    Sam was born in Los Angeles, California, June 4th, 1926, the oldest of Harry and Rose Stier’s three sons. Sam was just 10 years old when his mother died of tuberculosis. Before she left for the hospital that last time, she took her oldest son aside and told him, “Sam, be a good boy.” He took those words to heart after she died, watching over his two younger brothers, Irwin and Arnold, while their dad worked as a long-haul trucker.

    When World War II broke out in 1941, Sam was too young to enlist, but felt a sense of duty to fight for his country. When he turned 16, he tried to persuade his father to sign the papers allowing him to enlist in the Navy. His father refused. Sam asked again when he was 17. This time his father relented. Sam served in the Navy from 1943 through 1946, mostly in the South Pacific.

    One of his first jobs out of the Navy was as a TV repairman. He loved working with his hands and he loved electronics and figuring out how things worked. He was always thinking of better ways to do something, even when the “better way” took longer than the other way. In the case of his job repairing TVs, Sam just wanted to fix the TV right there at the customer’s house. Sam’s boss wanted those TVs brought into the shop so he could charge a higher price for repairing it. Sam was far too honest a man to go along with his boss’s scheme, so he quit.

    Not long after, Sam started working at Space Technology Laboratories, which later became TRW. As a spacecraft technician, Sam helped build many a communications satellite. He traveled to Cocoa Beach, Florida numerous times to help with the launches. He enjoyed those trips to the East Coast, but at the same time hated leaving his family.

    Over the years, he enjoyed a wide variety of activities. He was an avid skier and loved tinkering with cars. In the ‘70s he bought an Alfa Romeo, fixed it up, and raced it at the track in Gardena, California. He was a voracious reader, but also enjoyed outdoor sports like hiking and whitewater rafting. In later life, he took up woodworking, and did much of the work remodeling his home in Pollock Pines.

    And throughout his life, Sam was an amazing father. He supported his four daughters in everything they did. He always let them know he loved them and how proud he was of them. He taught his daughters by example. They learned to be kind from his kindness. They grew to be generous through witnessing so many acts of Sam’s generosity. They became responsible adults because he took responsibility for his actions. Everything Sam gave his daughters, they passed down to their own children, raising another generation of loving, generous people who live by their grandfather’s example.

    For many people afflicted with Alzheimer’s as Sam was, their personalities change. They become unhappy, sad, or angry. But Sam’s spirit was so strong that despite the theft of his memories by the disease, his basic nature never changed. He was just as kind, just as generous and upbeat throughout his illness as he’d always been. He charmed the staff at his care home, and they grew to love him as their own “Papa Sam.” And although it was difficult for his family to see Sam fade, to have him move farther and farther away from them with time, it was a great blessing that he never lost his loving nature.

    I love you, Dad. Still missing you.

  • Hablando en español

    I have been studying Spanish for a long, long time. For decades, if you start counting from the third grade when I was first exposed to el caballo, el gato, and el perro. In elementary school, we would watch a fifteen minute Spanish lesson on TV, where the teacher would bate, bate chocolate and sing Dos y dos son cuatro, cuatro y dos son seis… (which I just learned comes from a song by Stanley Lucero).

    I took Spanish all through high school, skipped it entirely in college (oddly, there was no foreign language requirement for my BA), then took classes here and there since then, some private, some not. I have a killer accent, probably because I started studying so young, but unless I’m kind of dumped into a situation where I have to speak only Spanish (like when I went to Mexico), I have to think really hard to say what I want to say.

    I bring this up because I just read about an interesting study where it was discovered that bilingual 8-month-old babies are better able to distinguish between two languages, even if they don’t speak either language. Better still, babies living in bilingual homes get a perceptual “boost” that will improve their thinking throughout their lives. Babies not exposed to a second language don’t have the same visual discrimination skills as bilingual babies do.

    Bilingual babies are apparently able to notice variances in how the face moves when a person is speaking one language versus another. Watching a muted video of people speaking French and English, for example, they could see differences in how the lips moved, how the jaw opened and closed and other facial changes. They’d get bored if a language they’d already been exposed to was repeated, but perk up if it was a new-to-them language.

    What’s also interesting about this is that learning a new language when you’re older is one way that’s supposed to fend off dementia. Bilingual Alzheimer’s patients are, on average, four to five years older. That is, being bilingual, they’re staving off the Alzheimer’s a few years longer.

    So, I’m going to keep studying español. Maintain those brain cells best I can. And speak Spanish to my beautiful granddaughter every chance I get.

  • The Second Thing to Go

    The memory, they say, is the second thing to go as you get older. And I don’t remember the first thing.

    My memory is pretty average. I’m quick to come up with the stuff I use/interact with on a regular basis. Some phone numbers. Functions in Word that would cause most people’s eyes to cross or glaze over. I have a mental block about names, but always have. Bizarrely, I will remember everything else about a person–the name of their horse, where they went to school, what kind of work they do. But ask me their name and I draw a complete blank.

    After years of feeling like an idiot, I finally started using the trick of finding a word that rhymes with the person’s name. It doesn’t even have to have anything to do with them (like Melanie, who as far as I know never committed a felony). But like all those other attributes about them, I’ll remember that rhyming word first, then that gets me to their name.

    The strength of my memory is a bit of an obsession of mine because my dad has Alzheimer’s. Mind you, he’s 84 years old. But even still, every time I can’t come up with a word while I’m writing, or when I run downstairs for something and go back up without it because I got distracted by moving the laundry to the dryer, I freak out just a bit. I know that my memory lapses have nothing to do with Alzheimer’s. But I worry nonetheless.

    I’ve mostly accepted my father’s disease and the fact that he no longer knows me by name. He still recognizes me as his daughter most of the time, but I don’t know that he’s aware of which of his four daughters I am. Since I live five minutes away from his care home, he sees me more than the other three. But I wonder sometimes if in his mind I’m a stand-in for all four of us, which is fine by me. He smiles when he sees me, is so happy that I’m visiting and that’s all that matters.

    I keep an eagle eye out for any scientific studies about Alzheimer’s, even though it’s too late to do my dad any good. Two that were reported recently in the New York Times are quite intriguing. They’re related to testing for Alzheimer’s rather than treatment of the disease, but of course it’s necessary to know the condition before treating it.

    One test uses a special dye that allows the plaques associated with Alzheimer’s to be visible via a PET scan. Living Alzheimer’s patients agreed to have their brains scanned using the technique and to allow scientists to examine their brains after they died. Of the 29 who have died and been autopsied, 28 were accurately diagnosed as to whether or not they had Alzheimer’s.

    The second procedure tests the level of beta amyloid in the blood. Amyloid is present in both the brain and spinal fluid in a healthy person. But when amyloid accumulates in plaque in the brain (which increases the risk for Alzheimer’s) less of it will be found in the spinal fluid. The theory is, amyloid will also decrease in the blood, and that is what this study is testing. Blood tests are a lot easier to perform on a large number of people than PET scans, which is why the success of this study would be a good thing.

    Of course once a practical test exists, there’s still the little issue of finding a way of reversing the course of the disease. Drugs are being developed to remove amyloid from the brain, which I presume you’d only want to do if there’s too much there to begin with.

    While contemplating all this, I got a mini-brainstorm that became a germ of a story. What if a near fail-safe treatment for Alzheimer’s were developed? A drug is created that will restore the brain to healthy normalcy. Except there’s a drawback–the drug wipes the brain clean of memories. The person treated would have to re-learn everything. He would not remember anyone from his previous life, including loved ones.

    Would you say yes for the treatment for your mother, father, sister or brother? For my own self, for my dad, I’d say YES in a heartbeat. It’s a terrible disease and nothing would make me happier than to see my dad cured, no matter what the stakes. But wow, what a choice to make.

    So what if you’re the one making the decision in this hypothetical story? That is, you’re the one with Alzheimer’s, still with enough function to make the choice for yourself. What would you choose?

    Not sure if I can make that choice myself.