An Emotional Subject

By Carole Tarrant, editor
published Sunday, March 16, 2008

I realized something was wrong when dad pulled out the contents of his wallet and carefully spread them on the living room floor. He was sitting on the couch, in the spot where he always folded socks and watched "60 Minutes."

But this - arranging and rearranging each dollar bill, insurance card and family photo - this he'd never done before, never.

Though there'd been signs. The man who'd never needed maps had become lost on a pin-straight Florida interstate. The man long known as a placid father of six had started to raise his voice at, of all things, The Weather Channel. Its forecasters seemed to enjoy issuing warnings of hurricanes, "pumping up" the threats, he said, reaching for the remote.

The trip to Mexico, the one not long after he retired, when dad got lost in the airport and had to have help getting on the plane - that was the biggest sign. Though at the time, we thought it was just a ministroke, something he could certainly recover from, quickly getting back to tennis.

Dementia was something we never considered, something we never talked about as a family.

And now it was too late. For here I was, watching my father inexplicably inventory his wallet during a visit I made home to see my mother, who was critically ill herself after a sudden and massive stroke. She couldn't talk then and would never recover enough to.

Dad's dementia, meanwhile, spiraled quickly over the next eight months. He needed a home health aide, then he needed assisted living, then he was locked down in a dementia ward.

He died 10 months after that trip home, officially from a type of aggressive dementia known as Lewy body disease. Unofficially, we know the cause also lay in a heart broken and a marriage lost. "I miss you," he wrote my mother after she'd moved into the nursing home.

Love and aging - it was the focus of Saturday's front-page story by reporter Beth Macy. "Does love inhabit the heart or brain?" Macy asked in her honest portrayal of the effects of dementia on the relationship of Tommy and Linda Rhodes of Roanoke.

Macy's story, "Love Beyond Knowing," was the first part in an occasional series you will see on our pages and Web site this year. In the series' second installment today, we hear about love and anger - the anger that wells up in Bill Wingfield as he cares for his wife, Kathy. She has faded into "a shadow of who she once was," he tells photojournalist Josh Meltzer in an accompanying video on roanoke.com.

No doubt many of our readers can relate to these couplings of emotion - love and aging, love and anger. The Roanoke Times will be devoting so much effort into this series, called "Age of Uncertainty," precisely because we believe this subject touches so many in Southwest Virginia.

And as Macy documents in today's story, if the issue of aging doesn't already affect you, it soon will, as baby boomers leave their jobs and greatly swell the number of retirees.

Are we prepared to take care of this increasingly older population? You'll hear us raise that question repeatedly this year in our reporting. And should we be marketing the Roanoke and New River valleys as a destination for retirees?

As Macy wrote, "In 2002, when Money magazine named the Roanoke Valley a top-10 place to retire, area aging experts looked at one another and sighed. Sure, it makes economic sense to recruit wealthy retirees, but just how well are we taking care of the old folks already here?"

It is one thing for a community to advertise itself as a retirement mecca, the next Asheville, N.C., populated by tanned retirees playing golf and attending arts festivals. It is another for a community to fully understand the consequences of enticing retirees to move here and further burden our already stretched resources.

Through our reporting this year, we hope to engage you to think about these questions and tell us your own experiences as caregivers, health professionals or simply as readers wondering, "How will I take care of my parents? And who will take care of me?"

We encourage you to share your thoughts and explore more aging resources on our related Web site, blogs.roanoke.com/ageofuncertainty.

Perhaps out of this discussion we may find a solution or two, or give someone struggling a new outlet for hope and comfort. Aging is often a hushed issue, one we deal with quietly in our families. But you'll see us move it prominently to the front page of The Roanoke Times as we recognize the devoted souls who care for our elders.

We are doing so to tell them, above all, thank you.

To the hospice worker who helped me understand my father's swift death, thank you. To the music therapist who sings show tunes to my mother each week, thank you.

A series like this happens because journalists have something to say and a means to say it. Thank you for spending time with it.