The Long Goodbye When Alzheimer’s Disease Struck Her Husband, Hogie Scott Didn’t Give Up. She Just Loved Him More

The disease came with walking papers.

“You’re fired.” Just like that, after 17 years. Tom Scott had begun to forget things, have mental lapses at the car dealership where he worked.

So they fired him.

That’s when he started walking.

Down every street in Cheney, all day every day. Across Eastern Washington University, into classrooms where students shifted uncomfortably. Professors would glance at the man who’d been both a Cheney city councilman and Mormon bishop and say “Morning Tom.” That was enough. He’d move on.

Today, Alzheimer’s is a disease with its own magazine covers and a veritable list of who’s who: E.B. White, Aaron Copeland, Sugar Ray Robinson. Ronald Reagan’s diagnosis is drawing attention worldwide.

But in 1983, you could be a social worker specializing in elderly issues and still not understand what was happening in your husband’s head.

Meredith “Hogie” Scott didn’t. His employers didn’t.

Now she helps the Alzheimer’s Association of Eastern Washington help others learn. How to join a support group, use adult day care, avoid wrecking your finances and your health.

In five free talks beginning Wednesday, experts and relatives will tackle the daily and decades-long challenges.

The annual workshops are a windfall for families, usually spouses, who feel baffled, frightened and mostly isolated by a disease they call “the long goodbye.” Scott’s education helps, but her experience helps more.

“I can say the same thing and it will not carry near the weight as someone who’s gone through it,” says one colleague. “She’s been there.”

The Scotts were there together.

Seth Thomas Scott was 58. They’d been married 28 years. Put three children through Brigham Young University. He used to tell people he’d met her in an institution. He had, in fact, while Hogie worked at Lakeland Village, but he had the kind of wry humor that he never explained much beyond that.

Looking back, it was easy to see early signs: the forgetfulness, the agitation. But the job loss was the warning shot. The degenerative disease, in which nerve cells in the brain stop communicating with one another, was upon them. Silently and with no physical symptoms.

The natural energy that all his life drove Tom Scott to work hard and think fast didn’t diminish. It crackled. He had to be moving.

Walking so far, so fast, he left behind the young church members hired to care for him. Wore them out. Hogie would race home from working at Lutheran Social Services to take over.

Mostly, that meant going for a drive. Every back road in Eastern Washington, every dusty, shady, rutted lane. Drive till dark because the motion of the car lulled him.

One night he picked up a yellow legal pad and wrote for 20 minutes. She didn’t move, didn’t breathe. A letter, she thought, he was writing a letter.

When she looked, the page was covered, every line, by words, all scrambled. The only one she recognized was: the.

Her lover, her best friend, the man who took care of her, stopped being able to.

No more meals at the table, he couldn’t sit still. When friends and relatives visited, he asked them to leave. She put deadbolts on the doors to keep him from wandering.

He would watch her lock the door, hang the key up next to it. Then he’d try to open the door with a screwdriver. The key was inches from his face, but he couldn’t connect it.

She had to be on the offense. Would there be a wait to see the doctor? They couldn’t afford to wait. Tom would walk around the waiting room and down halls opening doors, any door, like a child.

She smiled and shrugged off embarrassment. But late at night, bent over her cross-stitching, tears slipped off her face onto the fabric. It became her grieving piece.

Their two grown sons and daughter, loving and supportive, nevertheless lived out of town. Relatives and friends at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints visited and drove him around, never knowing what vital respite they gave.

But the disease was between them. For nearly 10 years, he stayed at home and off medication, as she wanted. But how often could she answer the same questions? How long would this last? Grief, pity, anger and resentment surfaced and resurfaced. And something unexpected.

With each lost connection, each disappearance of the man she knew, she felt a pure, unexpected love.

As he grew more unfathomable, he became more endearing.

Even when he could no longer dance. No longer swallow. Even when he could no longer speak, they sat for hours, holding hands.

The night of the cerebral hemorrhage, as he lay stricken on the living room floor, she knew she could just let him die. Except she couldn’t. She called 911.

Later at the hospital, their children en route home, she slipped into bed with him. For three hours she held him, just the two of them, and thought of blessings. That she had finished graduate school before he began to decline. That her chosen field gave her access to information and experts on Alzheimer’s. That they had gone through the spiritual journey of their lives together.

When she got up, he died.

Hogie Scott is 68 now, just past the age her husband was when he died in 1990. At Lutheran Social Services in Spokane, she trains seniors to counsel one another, find housing and face growing old. She quietly crusades for the Alzheimer’s Association, her experience lending an expertise all its own.

It is a different world. Her world is different, too.

The grieving piece, an intricate stitching of a blue-trimmed Victorian house, is framed and hung on her wall in Cheney. The Chevrolet with the 160,000 miles has been sold. But the loss is there, as palpable as footsteps on the porch.

One Saturday in February, when the wild sheep came down at Sullivan Lake, she wanted more than anything to go. A long drive, a long meandering drive, eating and riding in the car in companionable silence. There was only one person she wanted to go with.

“Tom,” she longed to say, “let’s go for a ride.”