Al Clark: Longing for home, these victims suffer fragile memory's loss

As a crow would fly it, the distance between Tarboro and Hickory is about 200 miles. But for my dad at the end of his life, “home” was like a constellation you've seen on cool fall nights all your life — so close and familiar, but inconceivably far away.

For victims of Alzheimer's, that's the way home feels. They spend the last years of life struggling to travel there as care-givers look on, whispering assurances as tears form.

A small group of those relatives and care-givers gathered by Greenville City Hall's whispering fountains this past Thursday night, as a busy evening of football festivities played out around them. It was part of a statewide “Candlelight Reflections” event sponsored by the North Carolina Division of Aging and Adult Services, an hour set aside to honor and remember those afflicted with what is a growing health concern nationwide.

Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause of dementia, affecting as many as 4 million Americans. It attacks the brain, resulting in impaired memory, thinking and behavior and can last from three to 20 years from the time symptoms begin. Chief among those are memory loss, difficulty performing familiar tasks, problems finding the right words and changes in mood and personality.

Struggling against the noise of passing traffic, local event organizer Keith Cooper offered the increasingly sad numbers closer to home: In North Carolina, 150,000 people now have Alzheimer's. Between 2003 and 2007, 11,000 people statewide died of it, 130 in Pitt County. As our population continues to age, the threat continues to grow.

Several of those who gathered Thursday offered personal experiences with the disease, including Greenville Mayor Pro-Tem Mildred Council, who represents the city on the Joseph and Kathleen Bryan Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, African-American Community Outreach Program. They told stories of loved ones who slowly lost track of themselves, their families and their surroundings. They read poems, sang songs.

Ms. Lottie Riddick's soprano voice warmed the quickly cooling evening with the familiar hymn, especially appropriate this night:

Why should I feel discouraged/ Why should the shadows come/ His eye is on the sparrow/ And I know He watches me ....

My grandfather was a city councilman in Hickory in the 1920s. My dad followed his footsteps 40 years later. He loved his town as much as life.

But as Alzheimer's set in, his grasp of city issues slipped. He finally had to step aside after 29 years as a councilman, thus beginning the rest of his life increasingly at the mercy of a gradually disintegrating mind.

Going home became his obsession. He wanted only to return to the spot in the Kenworth section of Hickory where he had grown up. He wanted to walk down the hill behind his boyhood home to the spring, where he once took butter to cool, or to again play with the rabbits he kept in a wooden, tin-lined box. Whenever he would wander, whenever he spoke of “getting back to Hickory,” that was where his mind was taking him.

Every day now as I look at that small box next to a chair at home, I am sternly reminded of Alzheimer's cruelest lesson, that what a fragile thing is memory and how it is a gift we so often take for granted — until it leaves us.

Al Clark is executive editor of The Daily Reflector. Contact him at aclark@reflector.com.