Dandelion-Strong: How Younger-Onset Alzheimer’s Disease Shaped Our Daughter

Video Version Here

Our youngest daughter got married last Saturday. It was a wonderful ceremony and reception, not to mention the bridesmaid luncheon, rehearsal dinner, and the getting-ready-all-day time!

The following Sunday and Monday were spent with family who were still in town, eating leftover wedding food. Now, I am alone and able to quietly reflect on the whole weekend.

First, our daughter and her now husband are amazing. Granted, they have a best friend who is a professional wedding planner who helped tremendously, but they orchestrated the entire event themselves. I had very little to do, which allowed me time to write out a thoughtful toast.

Actually, it was quite long, rather more like a speech. I delivered it from the stage right after the couple was introduced and danced their first dance together. Delivering it was a joy! Looking directly at them or out into the gathered crowd of guests, I could see and feel all the love that surrounded them, and us all.

In the speech, I expressed how her father’s diagnosis of younger-onset Alzheimer’s disease, when she was fourteen years old, shaped her life going forward. Because she learned how to best assist her dad at that young age, she felt empowered, at age seventeen, to sign up to be a counselor at a camp for special needs adults. I’m not sure she would have had the courage to do that if not for her experiences of helping her father. And that’s where she met her husband-to-be!

How could I not be impressed by a seventeen year old boy who willingly signs up to be a counselor at this camp?! He was the first person that our daughter told about her father. And the only person she trusted enough with that knowledge for a very long time. He supported her emotionally for the duration of Harvey’s illness, and even helped with his care.

Our entire nuclear family was gathered at Harvey’s bedside when he breathed his last breath—Harvey, me, our oldest daughter, her husband, our youngest daughter, and her then-boyfriend. What a gift to Harvey, and to all of us. That is family.

Because of her experiences at camp and at home, our daughter chose to major in education at college, and is now a special education teacher in an elementary school.

Her choices of a life-partner and a career path were direct results of her father’s Alzheimer’s disease. Even though they were eight very difficult years, it absolutely shaped her into the beautifully strong, caring, empathic person that she is.

I wrote her a poem that illustrated how pivotal the timing of her father’s disease was to her life. Titled “Alternate Reality,” I sketched out a fictional life for her without her father’s diagnosis, then sketched the reality.

I’m not willing to share that poem here; it’s for her. But I would like to share the last stanza of the poem that I wrote for our oldest daughter when she married. It is printed in its entirety in my memoir, with her permission. This particular poem is fitting for both of our daughters.

And I want to remember how singular this moment is,

At the altar, surrounded by all who love her,

A congregation of family and friends and saints.

Because I know he is here too, spectacled large grey eyes,

Standing tall on his runner’s legs, here in our hearts,

Here in his flash-forward memory. Here.

Watching this dandelion-strong daughter of ours,

In down-like tulle, parachute away.

I am so proud of these two strong daughters of ours. Despite all that they endured, they are resilient and kind, and I could not love them more.