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The dark descent of an unlikely victim

By Beth Macy, OPRAH.com
Lynn Forbish once brandished a red cape inside a Mexican bullfighting ring. (The bull fortunately just stood and stared).
Lynn Forbish once brandished a red cape inside a Mexican bullfighting ring. (The bull fortunately just stood and stared).
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • Reporter discovers former gruff copy desk chief Lynn Forbish has dementia
  • "Write my story," she begs,"People need to know about this thing"
  • Forbish dies in 2010 after refusing to eat; "She was gonna go her own way"
  • Over 10.9 million Americans are caring for someone with Alzheimer's or dementia
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(OPRAH.com) -- It's spring 2006, and a woman I vaguely recognize approaches me at a party, her auburn wig askew and a glass of wine wobbling in her hand. She announces cheerfully that, at 63, she has recently retired from the Virginia newspaper where I still work.

"I have dementia, in case you didn't know!"

I didn't know. In fact, I don't even recognize her until she lifts her wig to reveal a tamped-down mass of gray-brown curls.

It's our paper's longtime copy desk chief, whose reign of terror over young reporters and clunky sentences is legend.

Lynn Forbish. The sight of that name in your e-mail in-box could turn your palms sweaty and your face red. She was from the old school of reporting: If your mother says she loves you, check it out -- or Lynn just might do the checking for you, and you didn't want that.

She scolded coworkers for minor infractions like turning on their desk lamps, claiming the light bothered her eyes. She was gruff and merciless, and on the rare days when she said she actually liked something you wrote, it felt better than a bonus check.

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But on this day she is giddy, almost manic, and not at all uptight. The wig-wearing Lynn is so friendly that she invites me to follow her to her house (she happens to live next door to my babysitter, whose college graduation we're now celebrating), where she gives me a tour of her garden and asks me inside to look at her antique perfume bottle collection and Art Deco prints.

I expect Lynn's house to be as precise as her edits. But the piano where she once played Chopin waltzes from memory is piled with old mail and bills. Cartons of Febreze are stacked nearby in an apparently forgotten plan to mask the smell of an abandoned cat-litter box.

Lynn is in the early stages of Lewy body dementia, a degenerative brain disease that shares traits with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. She didn't realize how confused she'd become until our newspaper switched computer systems the year prior and she kept botching the most basic functions.

I later learn that a coworker once summoned the elevator to our third-floor newsroom, only to find Lynn standing inside, confused. She hadn't known which button to push.

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Her son and daughter-in-law have already taken her car keys away following a late-night collision with a street sign. The only thing left to lose is her house. "Where will you go?" I ask.

Lynn looks down, rubs her hands together, and says she isn't sure. "Do you know?"

Then she cackles, as if it's all a joke. She takes my hand and pulls me into her bathroom, squaring my shoulders in front of the mirror. It's like we're best friends -- only we don't know each other much outside of work, beyond occasional chats about my babysitter and our mutual love of gardening.

She takes off her wig again and, apropos of nothing, forces it onto my head, tucking my hair underneath. The new Lynn is happier, sillier, than anyone has ever known her to be.

"Write my story -- before I forget it," she tells me. "This thing that's...damn...this thing." She can't conjure the word. "People need to know about this thing. Because so much of this is...it's wrong."

Lynn is no longer the terror. "This thing" is the terror. And as she has been about so many things before -- before the Lewy bodies started to nibble away at her neurons and commenced turning them to goo -- the Queen of the Copy Desk is right. People need to know.

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In early 2007 I finally have the time to call Lynn about interviewing her, and she's thrilled. She remembers asking me to write an article for our paper -- "I want to help people," she says repeatedly -- but by now her recall of dementia statistics, let alone Latin tree names, is fading.

Gone, too, is her beloved house. She's living in a small suite in an assisted-living facility, a move recommended by a geriatrics team after daughter-in-law Katie reported finding Lynn's medicine mixed up in the cat food, cat food in the ice cream, and cat feces all over the basement floor. Lynn can no longer manage food preparation, not even the making of a simple sandwich, and has lost 40 pounds.

She's already reading on a fifth-grade level, with spatial abilities scoring in the mental retardation range. (All throw rugs on the carpet must be removed because they trip her up -- she doesn't know she can step on them.)

Larry is mad at himself for not having her tested earlier, when drugs such as Aricept might have slowed her decline. Her diagnosis "shot the hell out of my denial," he tells me later.

Unlike many American families, the Forbishes had discussed long-term-care insurance before they found themselves in crisis, but Lynn had rejected Larry's advice to buy it, even though she had a family history of dementia.

She planned to buy the insurance after she retired, not by the often recommended age of 59. (A 2006 AARP survey confirmed widespread misperceptions about long-term care, reporting that 52 percent of people 45 and older wrongly think Medicare will pay for assisted living; another 18 percent weren't sure.)

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These are probably not the facts Lynn had in mind when she asked me to write her story, but after learning that her facility costs $3,900 a month, they are foremost in mine.

When I arrive with a cup of her favorite coffee, she jokes about her condition: "Hey, maybe I'm just making all this dementia stuff up so I can be waited on!" she says, giggling.

Parkinson's-like tremors have developed in her hands, a common symptom of Lewy body, and occasionally Lynn sees people who are not there: A pair of girls are in her room and she's worried they might get hurt.

She frantically summons a personal-care assistant, who phones Katie, who calms Lynn down by telling her, falsely, that policemen are on their way to rescue the girls and all is well.

Their relationship was once strained several years ago after Katie's 3-year-old daughter returned from a visit to Nana's spewing four-letter words. But now she and Lynn talk for an hour on the phone every night.

Lynn discusses her boyfriend's fascination with John Wayne movies (which she can't stand), and Katie relays the national and world news of the day.

Sometimes when Lynn is agitated, she begs Katie to phone their relatives -- Lynn's daughter in Wisconsin, a sister in Texas -- to remind them that dementia runs in families and they need to be vigilant.

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During the spring of 2007, I visit Lynn weekly. One time we read over her old newspaper clippings, another we go through her movie collection.

She asks what it was like to cover the recent shootings at Virginia Tech, less than an hour away. It was horrific, of course, just the kind of story Lynn would have excelled at coordinating -- the long hours, the last-minute page changes, the late-night phone calls to verify a detail.

Reporters were so stressed afterward, I tell her, that our editor actually hired massage therapists to come into the newsroom. I expect her to find the massages amusing, coddling even, but Lynn shudders and tells me she's relieved to have been far removed from the biggest story to hit our region in years.

We drive to the Olive Garden, where she stares at her steaming plate of ravioli. Finally I realize that she's waiting for me to cut up her food. She asks if we can order wine with lunch and I say, Why not?

Halfway through our meal, she brings up the subject of her death: "I have no idea what happens to me when I go. But, see, now I don't worry about that so much. I guess it's a blessing."

On the drive home she's tired, though still quite agreeable. She has trouble finishing any sentence, so mostly she laughs. I let go and laugh along with her.

At a stoplight, she looks over at me, her eyes beaming, and says: "If you ever wanna get married someday, let me know."

She giggles, then I giggle, and then we're both doubled over, clutching our bellies.

Why not? I say.

That would be our last visit. April 2010: I'm at the end of a yearlong journalism fellowship at Harvard, studying care for the elderly, when Katie e-mails me the news: The Queen has passed.

Carol Lynn Forbish, 67, died the same way she lived -- bucking expectations. Back in 2006, doctors predicted she'd die in three to five years, probably from a painful infection, curled up in a fetal position.

But her last acts of will, I'm proud to learn, were vintage Lynn: Summoned to participate in a crafts class last winter, she refused to roll balls of yarn. When music therapy was offered instead, she couldn't sing or talk -- but her feet tapped in time.

Down with the yarn, up with the Beatles.

By spring she refused all food, clamping her mouth tight and turning her head, pretending to fall asleep. As Katie tells the story: "By God, she was gonna go her own way. She wasn't gonna take any crap from death."

Right now more than 10.9 million Americans are caring for someone with Alzheimer's or dementia. Worldwide, the number of Alzheimer's cases is expected to double by 2030.

And yet our culture often tells us that old age is something to run from rather than prepare for or discuss -- until we get a jarring midnight call from a policeman, as Larry Forbish did in 2006: Your mom crashed her car, she says the street sign "jumped out" in front of her; please come and take her home.

I like to think that's the story Lynn meant for me to tell, the one that ends with each of us asking our own aging parents: What are your plans? How will we pay? What can we do?

As I write this, the smoke tree in my front yard back in Virginia is 15 feet tall, gorgeous enough that strangers sometimes stop to ask for cuttings. I think of Lynn and happily oblige.

It's high summer now, and the white plumes have just turned sepia. When a breeze kicks up, one by one they detach and drift into the ether, and before I know it the tree has transformed again, each rendering more beautiful than the last.

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