June Hutton - Four Umbrellas: A Couples Journey Into Young-Onset Alzheimers

A Couples Journey Into Young-Onset Alzheimers

JUNE HUTTON & TONY WANLESS

Copyright June Hutton and Tony Wanless, 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Publisher: Scott Fraser | Acquiring editor: Kathryn Lane | Editor: Dominic Farrell

Cover designer: Laura Boyle

Cover image: shutterstock.com/ArtService

Printer: Marquis Book Printing Inc.

Not Me first published in Other Voices [1999/Volume 12, Number 1], H. June Hutton.

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of Four Umbrellas will be donated by the authors to Pauls Club, paulsclub.weebly.com.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Four umbrellas : a couples journey into young-onset Alzheimers / June Hutton & Tony Wanless.

Names: Hutton, June, 1954- author. | Wanless, Tony, 1949- author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200281615 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200281623 | ISBN 9781459747791 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459747807 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459747814 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCSH: Wanless, Tony, 1949-Health. | LCSH: Hutton, June, 1954-Marriage. | LCSH: Alzheimers diseasePatientsBiography. | LCSH: Alzheimers diseasePatientsFamily relationships. | LCSH: SpousesBiography. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

Classification: LCC RC523.2 .H88 2020 | DDC 362.1968/3110092dc23

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To the kids
who are no longer kids
may they never have to go through this

H is shoulder bag is open on the floor. On his knees and still in his stocking feet, he roots through it, calling out to me that he cant find his keys. He upends the black bag and pulls out a hat, gloves, an umbrella, and a plastic bread bag.

The bread bag is plucked up next, and out tumbles his phone, wallet, notebook, and pen all kept in the plastic bag so they wont get wet if it rains. But still no keys.

Now hes pulling open the cupboard drawers, rifling through them, yanking coats from hangers in the open closet to search the pockets. Next, the laundry bag.

A pile of clothes and possessions is growing on the floor of his home office that he fastidiously tidied yesterday, a task that took him all day.

You dont need your keys, I assure him. We can use mine.

He shouts at me to stop shouting at him.

I blink. Perhaps I had been. I try again: Were going to be late.

Grudgingly, he stops the search, sits on a chair and slips on his shoes, ties the laces. Painfully slowly, it seems to me, he stuffs his wallet and phone and notebook into the plastic bread bag and puts it back into his shoulder bag. I know better than to offer to help.

There is no time to tidy up the room and I hold my breath as he stands, worried that he will insist.

He starts to bend and I remind him: Were getting the answers today. Wed better hurry.

To my relief, he straightens, puts on his coat and hat.

We are about to head out the front door when, in a burst of inspiration, he darts over to the hallway closet to yank open those doors and emerges, triumphant, brandishing the missing keys.

Then he asks me, Where are we going, again?

We hurry outside, clutching our collars against the gusts of wind.

Spring is a fickle time of year: soft and scented one day, raw and cold the next. The seasons very unpredictability makes it an especially suitable time to start this narrative, one that is full of delays and disappointments, conflicting evidence and opinions, as well as, occasionally, periods of peace along with misplaced contentment all of them swirling around us, rising and settling and then rising again. All because no one could tell us what was wrong, could even acknowledge that anything was wrong.

Waiting has been, at times, unbearable. The process of getting a diagnosis dragged on for more than just one season; it lasted several years. Its April 2018 now, and as we head to the hospital again, we fear that the final answer to our question of what is wrong will be devastating.

At the centre of this story is one of the smartest people I know, a journalist named Tony Wanless.

Many of us claim to be better in one area of learning than another, at reading and writing, for instance, than at math and science, or vice versa. You can see my own bias in the way I ordered that sentence. Tony, however, was one of those rare individuals who was accomplished in both areas. He excelled in Latin and algebra, in science and the arts; he skipped a grade in high school. He had the sort of mind that easily grasped foreign languages, a skill due in part to the fact that he was born in the Netherlands where his family spoke Dutch. He was a toddler when they moved to Canada, and while he studied French at school, it was English that became the language used at home. His facility with language would become his greatest strength, leading him away from studies in engineering to a career in journalism.

Despite his talent and accomplishments, he has suffered from depression all his life. Perhaps, given his difficult family history, this isnt so surprising. Tony says his father had a temper and, within a couple of years of their arrival, unhappy to be working in Dutch farming communities in Ontario, he hatched a plan to rob a credit union. Tonys mother worked nights as a cleaner for the credit union, and he wanted her to let him in. She refused and threatened to expose him. He beat her unconscious in front of the children, and he was subsequently deported, not for the beating, but for the planned robbery. She raised three children on her own, which couldnt have been easy. When she remarried, to a Chatham resident of British background named Lyle Wanless, Tony traded his long Dutch birth name, Antonius Josefus Franciscus Stephanos Maria Versteeg, for an English one: Tony Wanless.