Jan's Story (3 page)

Ellen! Andre!

Everything fine here, with the surprise exception I never expected; turns out that recently, after a few days of my being somewhat “wacky” we took me off for a check up and here's the good/bad news … I've been diagnosed with (Early Onset) Alzheimer's. Don't know how or why … doesn't run in my family, etc., so I can't figure this out … however, the really GOOD news is that we live in the age of miracles … instead of being doomed to being shut in the attic, I am blessed with a bushel basket of pills which I now RELIGIOUSLY take … morning and evening … and as far as I can tell (well, actually it's BARRY who is my weather vane) it appears that the triumph of medicine is WORKING!

I know it SOUNDS GHASTLY … but as Barry will tell you, I am now my usual self thanks to the miracle of meds … and long may they reign!

So in the “Don't Cry for Me Argentina” mode … this does entail my carrying around the assorted pills, but hey! Consider the alternatives! I'm all for pills … morning and evening … the neurologist is pretty clear on what I can and can't do, which principally means I will never, ever miss a pill … but that's not such a big deal … and as it turns out there are all kinds of researchers out there trying to develop even BETTER meds for all of us “boomers” … talk about the world's largest captive audience!

Love, Jan

“The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rustling in the dark.”
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Every couple's life is their own private novel. It is a little personal history added day by day, experiences that can be remembered later with a word or even a look. Someone else talks about visiting some place … and with a glance at each other you can remember being there, the two of you.

Our private novel was about happiness and love. As simple as that.

She had favorite stories.

“Do you know when my dad was born?” she would ask friends who clearly did not. “He was born on January 14
^th
. And one of my brothers was born on January 14
^th
. And you know who else? Barry was born on January 14
^th
!”

It was Capricorn destiny, proof that we were fated to be.

Her favorite story was how we first met, in the newsroom at the Seattle TV station where she was working as a reporter and anchor. I was there covering a US Senate race for the CBS Evening News. This was before the days of laptop computers. I had commandeered her desk and typewriter and was frantically working on a script against a tight deadline. Jan came back into the newsroom from an assignment.

“I walked in and saw this
man
sitting at my desk,” Jan would say. “I walked up and told him, ‘this is my desk, and I need it because I have to write my story.'”

Then came the part she loved the most. “He looked up at me, and he RIPPED his paper out of the typewriter and stomped away.”

When she can remember, it always makes her laugh. I didn't laugh at the time it happened and not for a while afterwards. But in time it became one of my favorite stories about us. It reminded me of how she was pretty and spunky and totally unimpressed by me, the big-time network news correspondent who was a touch too impressed with himself.

I blessed the day we were married and look at the wedding picture of our blended futures … Jan and me and my two daughters, Emily (7) and Julie (2), from my first marriage. When I look at the pictures from that night, I see in her face a radiated joy, a kind of total, sheer happiness that I never believed I could give a woman, and yet it seemed natural. My smile is real and, if you look closely, maybe a bit unbelieving that someone this amazing was about to become my wife. Until her, I had never believed a man could be that happy, and I definitely never thought it would be me. But she made it so.

It was going to be a struggle combining the girls, Jan, and me into one family, but we thought it was exciting. We both knew it would be complicated, and we both had no doubts that in the end it would be fine.

Because we had each other. That is what
fine
is all about.

There were plenty of real life concerns in our early days. It was 1985, and my bank account was pretty much empty from my divorce and the legal fees. At the time, I was based in the CBS News Bureau in San Francisco. Our love triggered her life-changing moment.

She was in Seattle and quit her job. We needed to be together. I drove up in my second-hand Oldsmobile, rented a U-Haul trailer, and we packed her small apartment and moved her to where I was, and to where we would make our lives one.

We managed to scrape some money together and buy a tiny house in San Francisco in a neighborhood called Eureka Valley which was, as quirky San Francisco goes, not in a valley at all, but on a hill. And not just a hill, but a steep, steep hill up from the Castro District of San Francisco.

Our house was one of several ticky-tacky row houses built in the 1950s for policemen or teachers as affordable housing in the city. We loved it because it was a part of the city, perfectly plain and a touch ugly on the outside since it was devoid of any architectural charm. It was a box with windows in a series of houses that looked like boxes all running together. The outside paint job stayed with the theme of very ordinary … beige. I remember thinking that even the roof was boring … perfectly flat.

I loved it because I could almost afford it, and Jan loved it because it was ours.

The main floor was a living and dining room and a true 1950s kitchen. And the best part was that it came with a small corner fireplace in the living room. Upstairs had the only bathroom and three amazingly compact bedrooms. Each floor, divided up as it was into different rooms, had just slightly more total space than our two-car garage on the street level.

It had been a rental house when we bought it, so it was wanting for love and care. Every wall needed paint. But we didn't mind since all the work was just another part of making it ours.

From the first floor at night, as the fog slipped over the western hills and started toward the city, we could look out our living room windows and watch the first strands drifting down our street. Then came the real gusts and finally, we would all but lose the houses across the street.

Upstairs, the largest bedroom faced the street and seemed the perfect master bedroom. From the windows, we could see over the neighbors' roofs and on to downtown; City Hall, the Bay Bridge, the San Francisco Bay itself. I thought how wonderful to put our bed in this room and wake up each morning to the glittering city of San Francisco.

And so we did. We lasted maybe two nights.

The steep hill we lived on started several blocks down from us, so by the time a car reached the street in front of our house, it was deep down into first gear and struggling against an almost 45-degree incline, transmission grinding and engine at full throttle. All night long, we would be tossed awake by yet another mechanical assault on the top of the hill.

We finally retreated to the back bedroom, a space so small that we could just fit our queen sized bed with one side flush against the wall. That meant we had to climb onto the bed to get the covers straightened on that side. But it was quiet.

Good things happened in that bedroom. And in the morning the sun would pour in.

Downstairs, carefully detailed wooden molding ran along the ceiling in the living/dining area, cupids, flowers or such—a touch of art in an otherwise cardboard box of a house.

“I'm going to paint it,” Jan announced one day. “Pink and gold.”

Along the way, she added blue to the mix, working slowly and carefully, highlighting the different parts of the molding. For weeks, she climbed a ladder each day with tiny brushes and painted. She added elegance to the space.

“It's all about colors,” she explained to me, the person who did not study art history in college.

And “all about color” was why she painted the walls her favorite color … a pale pink.

“They use this color in mental institutions,” she explained one day, which caught me by surprise. “It helps calm people. Don't you feel calmer?”

Well, of course.

Nothing escaped our attention, not even the hardwood floors, which we had refinished and polished to a bright sheen.

So when our day was over and the fog poured down our street, we would sit on the sofa in our (calm) little house and light a fire. We dimmed the lights and opened a bottle of champagne because life was good, and another day together was more than enough reason for a celebration.

Jan got part time work at the local NBC-TV affiliate, as a reporter and occasional anchor. One day she did a story on an urban Boy Scout troop having a summer campout on the rooftop of a San Francisco skyscraper, and the next day I found myself doing exactly the same story for the CBS Evening News.

That was a good night by the fireplace.

We were the Darling-Darling couple, because that's what we called each other. At Christmas, our presents to each other would be “From Darling, To Darling.”

When I called and she heard my voice, it was always: “Darling!” She was always happy to hear from me, whether I was calling from somewhere else in the world where I was on assignment, or from the office to chat about dinner.

Her parents (mine were long since gone) teased us because we always kissed. “That will end when the honeymoon wears off,” they said confidently.

But it didn't.

I am the child of a rocky marriage and a mother who struggled with the twin demons of alcoholism and chronic depression so serious she needed electro-shock therapy. Her struggles made for a difficult childhood and made me shy, reticent, and often suspicious of the world. Not Jan. If we passed someone begging on the street, and she felt the person was truly in need, she gave money. If she had none, she would give me that look and I dug into my pockets and put money into the cup or glass or hat.

Jan developed her taste for exploring the world early because her father was a globe-trotting vice president for Boeing, selling jetliners in China and Singapore and across Asia. It seemed normal to her that Dad would be gone for weeks and come home from places that, once she learned about them, were worthy of her curiosity and fueled her desire to visit.

She was the oldest of five and grew up taking care of brothers and sisters. They all grew up in the same house that was forever being remodeled as they got bigger and their needs changed. Summers as a kid meant out the door in the morning to the pool or to play with friends and then race back for meals. College was the University of Washington across town.

While in college, she scrimped and saved so she could travel around Europe one summer with friends. She loved it. They had no itinerary—when they got tired of one place they would take a train to somewhere else. It was the kind of trip that only those open to adventure could experience.

Adventure and travel may have been part of my appeal to her. Our life together was always about me coming and going on stories, or us coming and going on trips.

We came together because of our sureness about being a couple. There was no anticipation of adventure outside of the good things that happened when we were together.

But adventure came calling and we couldn't wait to see what was coming next. But adventure is like a coin – it can have two sides, one good, one devastating. For us, it would be both.

     
Individuals may feel as if they have memory lapses, especially in forgetting familiar words or names or the location of keys, eyeglasses or other everyday objects. But these problems are not evident during a medical examination or apparent to friends, family or co-workers. (Seven Stages of Alzheimer's Disease from
www.alz.org
, the Alzheimer's Association)

Most people think of Alzheimer's as a disease of the old. They have a story of a relative … a grandparent, a great aunt, a distant and aged uncle … whose elderly life in their seventies or nineties ended in the solitary desolation of this disease. But youth is no protection. The Disease can strike people in their twenties or thirties. And when it strikes early, it can be unusually ravenous, quick and vicious.

And researchers say that Early Onset seems to move faster toward death. “It's as if they have the more malignant form of Alzheimer's disease,” says Dr. Jeffrey Cummings, director of the UCLA Alzheimer's Disease Center. “It comes on earlier, and it lasts a shorter period of time, and leads to death sooner.”

As an example of ravenous, quick, and vicious, consider the story of Mark Priddy, the subject of an article in a London newspaper in July, 2009.

Mark was an ordinary guy, remembered for being “super fit.” When his symptoms began, he was initially diagnosed with depression. When he was thirty-three, doctors determined that he had Early Onset Alzheimer's Disease. Mark and Dione (his wife) had two daughters. By the age of forty, he could no longer speak, walk, or feed himself.

When I think of the clues strewn across our past that Jan had Alzheimer's, one of them was her fading ambition. She had always worked, from college onward and during most of the early years of our marriage. When we lived together in San Francisco from 1984 to 1986, she worked for the local NBC affiliate as reporter and fill-in anchor. It was the same when we moved overseas…and then it wasn't.

I never dreamed this had anything to do with Alzheimer's Disease. There was no reason early on to make that leap, and every reason as time went by to deny it.

And as time went by, denial was a much crafted, much practiced art for us both.

“In Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One.”
~Yakov Smirnoff

In the spring of 1986, a year into our marriage, CBS News offered me the job as their Tokyo correspondent. The original assignment was supposed to last two years, but somehow we just kept going around the globe – from Tokyo to Moscow, then to London and back to Tokyo for a second posting.

It meant giving up our San Francisco house and lifestyle, and the comfort of living in a country where we could speak the language and understand the culture. But Jan embraced it as if this was exactly what she signed up for, and when do we begin.

She had no doubts that we would be fine, would settle in and could figure out the rest as it came along. I said yes, based on her confidence and her sheer excitement for the unknown. I couldn't turn it down once Jan got excited. If she could make it work for both of us – and she was sure she could – the least I could do was agree and call the movers.

Jan loved Tokyo and its sense of the exotic East, but the next call to move on was not so good because Moscow was the capital of a culture she came to hate, despite that spirit of adventure. “The Russians feel sorry for themselves all the time.” It was said as much in sadness as simple observation. She believed strongly about creating good in your own life. I tried to gently remind her that we had a few more advantages than the average Russian.

“I don't know,” she insisted. “I think they just love being depressed.” She could never seem to comprehend why someone would choose “being depressed.” To her, life was about finding the good in each day and each experience, no matter how trying. But in Russia, people seemed on a centuries-long course of endless tragedy. It made for great, if agonizing, literature and extraordinary classical music. But the sense of gloom rubbed up against Jan's very nature. She believed that each person made their own happiness, and she believed that especially for the two of us. If we had chances to see or do new things, it was up to us to seize those moments and make them ours.

We had a kitchen large enough for an old wooden table and chairs suitable for breakfast and, on cold Russian winter nights, we would sit with a bowl of borscht and be happy for the warmth of the stove and the cooking. The rest of the rooms were big and simple … one for dining, another as a living room, and one large single bedroom. German prisoners of war had been used to construct the building, and it was solid, with some interior walls almost three feet thick.

Moscow was perfect for Jan's dinner-party organizing because most of us socialized in our homes. At that time the Soviet-era propagandists still touted Moscow as the glorious culmination of Communism. In fact, it was so
in
glorious that it had almost no functioning restaurants. By functioning, I mean the absolute bare minimum … clean and with safe, edible food. Instead, the food was badly, and sometimes barely, cooked. The cheese was dried and fly-stained because it had been left sitting out for hours, and the norm was service with a snarl. It was so bad that a business lunch would usually be a rendezvous at the American Embassy snack bar for a hamburger and a soda.

Case in point of how bad it was; one of the few hotels that catered only to foreigners had the city's only sushi restaurant, which was run by a Japanese company. But to be sure that the sushi was safe, we checked the schedule of the two Tokyo-to-Moscow flights each week and went to the restaurant the next day when the fish from Japan was fresh off the plane.

Another prime example of Moscow's culinary delights was the butcher's market around the corner from our apartment. Shoppers had to swat away the clouds of flies to get at the meat. Street vendors sold ice cream only in the worst of winter because they had no refrigeration, and the bitter cold was all that kept the ice cream frozen. Even so, we would not buy ice cream from them or any other dairy products from the grimy, dusty local stores that smelled of sour milk.

So we, as journalists, diplomats, and foreign business people, entertained in our apartments, where the food was safe despite the fact that our conversations were monitored by the KGB. Shopping was a trick, and Jan, true to her nature, mastered it quickly. To guarantee safe food, we had all our groceries shipped in from nearby Finland, using a store that, for years, had specialized in providing food and other necessities (toilet paper, new tires for the bureau cars, bath towels, diapers, ball point pens) to Moscow's foreigners like us.

Once a week Jan would take out pen and paper, go through their grocery catalog and prepare the food order, right down to meat and milk. About all we could trust to buy in Moscow was bread and sometimes cabbage for borscht when it was in season.

Armed with her list, Jan went up to the office for a session with the telex machine, basically a typewriter. It worked like a phone in that we could dial another telex anywhere in the world. These were the days before faxes, and in Moscow there were days when the phones could barely transmit a voice. The order was telexed off early in the week.

On Thursday, dozens of company drivers would head for the train station to pick up the boxes of imported groceries shipped in from Helsinki for their foreign bosses. If we were having people for dinner, the pre-planning was far more extensive. And if you forgot to order something, there was no place to run out to get it. It either came in from Finland on the once-a-week train shipment, or you did without, or you went sheepishly to a neighbor and borrowed what you forgot to order.

Inviting friends to our apartment fueled Jan's enthusiasm for cooking. Everyone, from our next-door neighbors coming for Saturday night dinner, to visiting dignitaries looking to connect with American journalists (and find an edible meal) were welcome at our table. Al Gore, then a Tennessee senator, was in Moscow on a trip investigating environmental issues, and a friend brought him around to our place for lunch. He confessed that he liked spicy food, which was also a huge favorite of Jan's.

She sliced some fresh Russian bread and pulled out a jar of what I considered to be insanely hot sauce, which was a kind of searing jelly concoction from a southern Soviet area. I thought the jelly might be strong enough to eat through the glass and certainly though the lining of the stomach. She knew it was a hit when the hot peppers made sweat pop out on Gore's forehead. They both had seconds.

Jan could just as easily plan and cook a formal dinner for twelve and loved the challenge. The rest of us would marvel at the result and, at the end of the evening we'd raise our glasses in a happy and noisy toast to Jan, the Chef.

Jan also brought her artistic touch to the flat, which was furnished. We could only bring clothes and a few paintings from Tokyo, so she picked out the most vibrant paintings, the ones with bright reds. And when we bought art work in Moscow to decorate, it was the same … splashes of color … as if the brightness of the flat inside could somehow neutralize Moscow's endless gray.

Our flat was bugged by the KGB, of course, and we had no choice but to live there since it was the company apartment assigned by the Soviet authorities. CBS News reporters and their families had lived there for decades. Each summer, the girls would come and spend two months with us, and we would befuddle the eavesdroppers by moving our bed into the dining room so the girls could have the bedroom.

And, within a night or two, we would hear the scraping, like a huge rat slowly creeping and crawling in the ceiling. “The idiots,” Jan would say, half-delighted with their lack of subtlety. They were, of course, moving the listening devices through the crawl space in the ceiling from the bedroom to the dining room where we had moved the bed in the summer so they could listen in on our pillow talk.

At the end of summer the girls left, and we moved back into the bedroom. “Here it comes,” Jan would say, all but laughing. And sure enough, the first or second night, we heard the scraping noises as they dragged the listening device from the dining room back to the bedroom. I can hear it, still. And when we talk about it, and when she remembers, it still makes her giggle.

Life could be tricky in Moscow, especially dealing with the authorities. We quickly learned that there were a lot of rules, mostly ignored, since the bureaucrats did what they wanted. Or sometimes, it seemed, they made up new rules, just for the occasion, and usually so they could say …
nyet
.

So we were nervous as we packed to leave Moscow for the next assignment in London. It meant direct dealings with the authorities, but Jan turned it into a total triumph. One of those dealings centered on getting our Soviet-era art out of Moscow, and it was one of her proudest moments. Each piece, including the few antiques we bought there, needed a special stamp from the Ministry of Culture approving it for export to make sure we weren't absconding with any state treasures. That meant a personal inspection visit from Ministry officials before anything could be packed.

Jan researched it well and had gift bags ready for the two women inspectors who showed up. The important gift was American-made Marlboro cigarettes, practically a currency of its own in the desperate poverty that was Moscow in those days. This was the era where the Soviets had so little in their lives that people would get in line sometimes not even knowing what the line was for; only that something might be available in a shop. Foreign goods were rare and, in some cases, dangerous to have.

The ladies from the Ministry were not initially that friendly and had the grim heavy look that came from too many potatoes and loaves of bread, and too little meat, which was the typical Soviet diet washed down by the ever-present vodka. At first they were authoritative, bordering on rude, and in no mood to help us in any way. But Jan found something they, from such different upbringings and points of life, had in common … a shared passion for art. And these women, who were so unpleasant at first, soon warmed to Jan and her enthusiasm for beauty and its expression in paintings. We had some art books and Jan pulled several off the shelf, including my single favorite—a massive coffee table book of paintings by Edward Hopper. The women had never seen his works.

When I came home for dinner, I found all five-foot-two of Jan standing proud. She told me about the visit and said they had softened when she showed the women our art books, especially the collections of works by Hopper.

“Which,” I said, looking at the empty space in the shelf, “isn't there.”

“Nope. I gave it away.”

Now, this moment could have ended badly. “You gave it to them? My Hopper book?”

She smiled at me, rather self-satisfied, because she knew this story was going to end well. “Look,” she said, walking up to the first of our paintings. On the back, it had the stamp of approval for export. “See, here's another one.” She laughed. “I got everything approved!”

I didn't laugh right away. After all, I loved that Hopper book. But she reminded me that we could buy Hopper books by the bushel outside of Moscow, and that these women had never seen his paintings. Their awe at his talent, their discovery of his work, trumped our having a book that we could easily replace. To Jan, it wasn't even a question, but an instinct, to share. Of course they had to have that book.

We laughed about that story later. I saw it as part of her ability to sense and understand people, which was invaluable to our nomadic way of life.

And it got all the art to London, where we ended up living in a tiny apartment near the CBS Bureau in Knightsbridge, down the street from Harrods and a quick cab ride to theaters and great shows.

It was a neighborhood, urban and exciting, with art galleries, restaurants and architecture from the many eras of London's lifetime. Everything we lacked in Moscow, we had in London … wonderful theater, a myriad of restaurants, pubs for unwinding on a Friday night and, as an extra bonus, we could speak the language.

We could walk five minutes to the Victoria and Albert Museum, or head off in a different direction to watch the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, or wander over to Hyde Park to feed the swans.

These were hard, dangerous days for any CBS News reporter based in the London Bureau. Our coverage area was all of Europe and Africa, and occasional duty in the Mideast including trips to Iraq. It meant spending a lot of time away from Jan—much of it in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War in the early 1990s, and in other places like Somalia.

Jan knew the stories and the risks and while she didn't like that last kiss before I headed off for an airplane, she knew I wanted to cover the stories, and she wanted that for me. She swallowed her fear, smiled and hugged, and let me go.

There were plenty of dangerous places, but when I was there the worst was probably Bosnia. Sarajevo snarled with sniper fire and shuddered from artillery shells that were lobbed into the city on a daily basis. The Holiday Inn was home to visiting foreign reporters, and its one major drawback was that it was near the front lines, which ran through part of the city. That meant all the windows were shot out. We stayed in rooms on the back side where the sniper bullets usually couldn't reach us, but the mortar shells hitting around the hotel had blasted out the windows on the back side as well. Our news team traveled in armored cars and did stories on those who hadn't survived the day.

Sometimes people would die in ones and twos, sometimes in groups as mortar rounds dropped in, aiming for places like the central market where people gathered to buy what food they could find. No one in the city knew where the next shell would hit, and that was what made Jan perpetually frightened each hour I was in Bosnia and away from her.

Mortar rounds are insidious because they make no sound coming down. Tank rounds make a noise, a kind of whistling, which you hear before they hit. It gives you time to fall flat. It's a false sense of security, but you hang on to it. Since they are silent, there is no warning, no noise. One minute life is normal, then a blast and a second of shock. The mind is slow to grasp such instant chaos. The next sounds are the screams of the injured, or the gasps of the dying. There is something horrible about the screams, a guilty horror because they aren't yours.