Kate and I met in the fall of 1960 while students at Texas Christian University. I was a junior. She was a sophomore transfer from Stetson. We met at a Sunday night social at the home of another student and high school friend of Kate’s. Apart from meeting, neither of us remembers anything else about that night or any contact that we had between then and December 19, 1961, when we had our first date. I took her to a performance of Handel’s Messiah. We had no idea that would be married almost 18 months later.
In some ways, we were from two different worlds. Kate was born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas. I was born and raised in West Palm Beach, Florida. Her father was from a family of 8 children, 6 of them lived their entire lives in Fort Worth. Only one of the eight children lived out of state. That meant Kate grew up with lots of aunts, uncles, and cousins. I, on the other hand, had no relatives living in my home town except my mother, father, and brother. I had grandparents who lived in Tallahassee along with an uncle and two cousins, but we rarely saw them. My other grandmother lived in St. Louis and stayed with us during the winter. We both grew up in Methodist families, but her family was more actively involved in church than mine. In addition, West Palm Beach was a much more secular place than Fort Worth.
Our first date came near the end of the first semester of my senior year. I had taken a part time job at a funeral home at the beginning of the second semester. This job turned out to play a central role in our courtship. I was on a tight budget; so I didn’t have much money to spend on dating. The funeral home offered a couple of perks that helped me. First, as flowers were transported from the funeral home to the cemetery, there were always some that came loose from the bouquets or stands on which they were fixed. Sometimes I would pick up a carnation or rose and drop by the campus to place it in the driver’s seat of Kate’s car. Another benefit involved my occasional trips to another city to pick up a body and bring it back to the funeral home for a service and burial. When I was on these trips, the company paid for my meals. They let me take Kate along and picked up her meal as well. We would have a nice dinner. Then we stopped by the funeral home to pick up the body, and bring it back to Fort Worth. Looking back, it’s hard for me to believe that Kate’s parents never had a problem with this. At least they never said anything.
Kate and I married on May 31, 1963, and lived in Fort Worth the next two years. We both pursued master’s degrees at TCU, she in English and I in sociology. She taught English at a local high school. I had an assistantship in sociology for which I taught a couple of introductory courses. Upon the completion of my M.A. in the summer of 1965, we moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where I started a Ph.D. program in sociology at the University of Wisconsin. Kate took a job as a secretary to the director of graduate admissions in the English department while finishing her master’s thesis. She received her M.A. in 1967. We both considered our three years in Madison as a very special period in our marriage. We felt like this was the first time for us to be on our own since we had lived our first two years in Kate’s hometown. Neither of us had ever been to Madison before that July afternoon we drove into the city. The university, the town, and the friends we made there changed our lives in lasting ways.
Because there were so many spouses applying for teaching positions in the public schools in that area, Kate was unable to get a teaching job. That turned out to be a good thing. She became a secretary to the director of graduate admissions in the Department of English. He was quite a scholar and a very interesting man. He and his parents, German Jews, left their home country in 1938 as Hitler’s persecution of Jews intensified. Several years later, one of her friends at TCU married her boss, and Kate kept up with him until his death in 2015. This relationship provided Kate with a strong bond to the university even though she was not a student there.
In July 1968, we moved to Raleigh, North Carolina where I took a position as Assistant Professor of Sociology at NC State. Like the move to Madison, this one signaled the opening of a new chapter of our lives. I was beginning my professional career, and Kate was pregnant with our first child, a daughter, when we made the move. Two years later our son was born. During the Spring of 1971, I joined the faculty of the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee. So off we went to a new adventure in Knoxville where we have lived for the past 47 years.
I taught at the university for seven years while Kate cared for our two children at home until they were in preschool. Like most other parents, our lives were wrapped up with our children. Kate, who didn’t cook at all before marriage, became quite a cook afterwards. Just about everything she learned came from her mother who had reputation as an excellent cook and hostess. Not everything she knew about cooking came from her mother though. During the early 1970s, she became a fan of Adele Davis. She also took great interest in our childrens’ diets. She wanted them to have snacks that were nutritional. She used to make homemade yogurt regularly and mixed it with orange juice for frozen popsicles. She made homemade whole wheat bread and pizza with whole wheat crusts.
When our second child was about a year away from first grade, she enrolled in a master’s program in library science. She completed her second master’s degree in 1977 and began a career as a librarian/media specialist with the public school system. As she did, I left teaching to embark on a career in my own market research business that continued until my retirement in 2012.
In 1990, shortly after her father died, Kate retired from the public school system and became a volunteer librarian at our church. This turned out to be a fulfilling position for her. She was well qualified professionally with an M.A. in English and a second master’s in Library Science. Beyond this her background in church and her personality made her a natural for this position. She loved working with the staff and the members, especially the children. She served in this position 19 years. Her only reason for retiring was her Alzheimer’s. That made her work more challenging. She just couldn’t handle it in the way she had done in the past.
As a volunteer, her work provided her a good bit of flexibility that she hadn’t had with the school system. That is important because my professional career involved a lot of travel. Occasionally, especially if I had a meeting in New York, she would travel with me. Either before or after my business obligations, we would enjoy ourselves. In New York that meant attending Broadway shows.
It was also a time when both of our children had graduated from college and establishing their own families. In 1998, our first grandchild was born. Since that time we have added 4 others, twin boys for our daughter and her husband and 2 sons and a daughter for our son and his wife. Up until the oldest was 15 or 16, they visited us one child at a time for a week each summer except for our daughter’s twins. They always came together.
Sometime around 2006 Kate began to exhibit the first signs of Alzheimer’s. She recognized that her memory was not as good as it used to be. I tried to reassure her and repeatedly told her that we all develop greater diffculty remembering things as we age. I wasn’t just saying this; I really believed it. As time passed, I noticed other things that were signs that she wasn’t the same. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I just thought that her behavior patterns didn’t seem as functional as they used to be. For example, we ate dinner out more frequently now that the children were away, but now she wasn’t preparing for dinner on a regular basis. That led me to start a little cooking myself. I also began to take out food from several different restaurants. She wasn’t as careful about clutter around the house. In addition, she was frequently misplacing or losing things.
Kate has always been directionally challenged. Now, however, she was having difficulty remembering how to get to places that she had grown accustomed to going in the past. I would received calls at the office that she was lost and seeking my help getting her where she wanted to go.
By the summer of 2011, both of us began to realize her symptoms were more than what we should expect with aging. We decided she should have a discussion with her doctor at her next appointment in December. Her doctor recommended that she get a PET scan and arrange a psychological analysis with someone who specializes in diagnosing dementia.
Her doctor arranged these appointments. On January 21, 2011, we both went to see her doctor who was to tell us the results of her scan. That is when we received confirmation of what we had been suspecting a long time. She had Alzheimer’s disease.
We couldn’t imagine the changes that we would face in the years ahead., but we immediately committed ourselves to making the most of our time together. That included taking care of a variety practical matters as well as the really important things like what we wanted our lives to be like in the years ahead.
I will have to say that Kate is the one who was determined to get a diagnosis. I didn’t fully understand what a difference that knowing would make as we planned for the future. It turned out that knowing for sure that she had Alzheimer’s, changed my outlook toward Kate and her behavior. I now understood that she couldn’t control the things she was doing or not doing. I stopped blaming her. Knowing that our time was going to be shorter than I had thought caused me to value more deeply all our moments together. It also led me to take much more initiative in planning things we could do. That included travel, attending many concerts and theatrical performances, eating out more frequently and making mealtime a social occasion, and spending time with friends.
At the time of this writing, I believe Kate is in the early part of Stage 6 of the 7-stage model of Alzheimer’s. (See the Alzheimer’s Association’s website for more information.) I am satisfied that we have achieved our goals. Of course, we haven’t been able to avoid the changes that Kate has made as a result of the Alzheimer’s. We have, however, been able to live full lives. In this respect, we have been more fortunate than many couples who face this disease. We have enjoyed life throughout our marriage and have been doing the same as we continue Living With Alzheimer’s.
