A take-charge kind of guy, Gasby did his research.
“Some 5.2 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s,” he says; half a million people die of it every year. Perhaps due to higher rates of diabetes and heart disease, it hits the black community the hardest: by age 85, “half of all African Americans have it.”
Knowing the facts can be empowering, but they don’t make dealing with the disease any easier. Smith lost things constantly; “hoarded” clothing, to Gasby’s irritation; and, though she was previously fastidious, ignored sloppiness. She shut family out physically and friends, emotionally. Long-ago recollections were sharp, but her short-term memory was all but lost.
When things got worse and Smith was inadvertently put in a dangerous situation, the family found expert advice, only to learn that there was little they could do. Alzheimer’s has no cure. It can barely be “managed.” They would just have to deal with the day-to-day challenges and learn to cope…
Of his wife, and their plans one day, author Dan Gasby says, “She sits…at the breakfast table, the love of my life, waiting quietly for me to tell her what to do.”
Is there a sentence more heartbreaking than that? I don’t think so, and you’d be likewise hard-pressed to find a book that will affect you more than “Before I Forget.”
Would you blame anyone if you saw a pity-party in this book? Probably not, but there’s no whining in Gasby’s words, nor will you find “poor me” in what B. Smith contributes (with Michael Shnayerson). Instead, there’s resignation here; a we’ll-get-through-this wrapped in a love story that gets more and more poignant as the story progresses.
(“Before I Forget” by B. Smith & Dan Gasby with Michael Shnayerson, foreword by Rudolph Tanzi, PhD, c.2016, Harmony Books, $25/$33 Canada, 322 pages.)
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