And so Mrs. Wood, How Was the Party?

By Sally Wood

After a decade of unexplainable ailments, Fred was belatedly diagnosed with Parkinsons disease at age fifty. Realizing there was a limited amount of time to enjoy life, Sally quickly convinced Fred that they should flee the suffocating small New England town, where their successful business and active involvement in many facets of the community, were becoming an overwhelming burden. Florida seemed like a logical care-free destination, where their past trials could be put aside, and the present moment enjoyed. Several years passed as the reality of his illness grew more bleak. After a number of discouraging visits, his doctor offered Fred the opportunity to be one of the first few American participants in a very controversial and totally secret medical research adventure. An arduous, cutting-edge journey ensued. Being first is not always wise or wonderful. Being given the ability to maintain hope in a hopeless and ever worsening situation, was the elusive pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491743775

Sally Wood

Sally Wood lived much of her life in a small seaside town in Massachusetts where her husband owned a small insurance and real estate agency. The parents of three active kids, both she and her husband were leaders in a variety of community affairs. When she began to suspect something was seriously amiss, and the family business started to develop serious problems, she gave up her volunteer work and joined the firm as a Realtor. From that day on they slowly reversed roles. She became the leader and he followed. For better or worse... Today she lives in Sarasota FL where she has learned to love and appreciate each day of this phase of her life.

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Copyright © 2015 Sally Wood.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-4376-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-4377-5 (e)

iUniverse rev. date:    02/24/2015

Contents

Chapter 1 FOG

Chapter 2 THE BEGINNING

Chapter 3 STARTING OVER

Chapter 4 THE END OF THE BEGINNING

Chapter 5 OUR MENAGE A’ TROIS

Chapter 6 HOPE

Chapter 7 GOD

Chapter 8 AN UNCHARTED COURSE

Chapter 9 FAITH

Chapter 10 CONFUSION

Chapter 11 DOOM

Chapter 12 ANSWERS

Chapter 13 MIRACLE

Chapter 14

Chapter 15 VALIDATION AND CLOSURE

DEDICATION

In memory of

Frederic H. Wood Jr.

For:

Our children,

Nancy, Mark and Fred 3rd

and their extraordinary families.

Also:

My sister, Petey,

and my late aunt, Mardie,

who were there

for Fred and me,

each and every step

of the way.

And for my friends,Viva and Estelle,

who, encouraged me to

write the book.

Family and friends:

I am grateful for both.

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Frederic H. Wood Jr.

1934 - 1994

Chapter 1

FOG

The fog comes in on little cat feet.

It sits looking over harbor and city

On silent haunches and then moves on.

Carl Sandburg

Seeking refuge from the sweltering heat and humidity of a lazy mid-August afternoon, we pointed the bow of our shiny new boat due east from the narrow harbor entrance. Streaming behind us on the navy blue ocean our foamy white wake boiled and bubbled as the motor roared and moved us quickly toward our goal. Somewhere in the vicinity of the tall gray granite beacon known as Minot Light, approximately three miles off shore, we found what we were seeking. The invisible wall of fresh smelling cool air always hung somewhere offshore. As the suffocating blanket of thick and stagnant air lay over the land, the cool clean and refreshing air hung over the sea. One simply needed to know where to find it.

A mile or so beyond the lighthouse Fred chose a spot and turned off the motor. We stood up and took long deep breaths of the clear clean air; air that was heavy with the salty smell of an east wind, blowing gently across Massachusetts Bay from the Atlantic Ocean. It was a smell we loved, it was a feeling we loved and it was a place we loved.

Floating aimlessly in the refreshing coolness, we settled back on the comfortable seats to enjoy a cold drink and a few hours respite from the ever-present demands of business and family. The voices of gulls flying high overhead and the soft chugging of lobster boats in the distance blended with the rhythmical lapping of the waves gently colliding with the sides of the boat. The familiar sounds soothed our spirits as we relaxed, day dreamed and drifted further away from the shore. Life in our small seaside town, twenty or so miles south of Boston, was good and the insurance and real estate business was brisk. Our marriage was more than good, our love having grown as the passing years ticked away. The time had arrived when we could enjoy a few luxuries and one we enjoyed very much was the sleek fiberglass powerboat we were lounging in. It had replaced the old wooden Nova Scotia lobster boat that Fred and the kids caulked, sanded and painted every year. Unfortunately, no matter how well they thought they did the job, the morning after the launching we would go down to the harbor to see if it was still floating. More often than not, the bow would be sticking out of the water. Fiberglass suited us.

In the distance we could see several other boats bobbing at anchor, their occupants lazily fishing. We had given up fishing along with the Novi, opting instead for leisurely hours meandering up and down the rocky Massachusetts coastline. The picturesque ledges were a hazard to unwary mariners, having claimed hundreds of lives and vessels over the years since the explorer Captain John Smith first sailed into the harbor in 1614 and discovered the beautiful area. My family had made it their home for many generations.

On the horizon, a large yacht sailed south toward Cape Cod and Nantucket, its full white sails catching the breeze. Time passed quickly. An hour or so later we were surprised to look up and see a line of thick, dark gray fog rising ominously over the sky line, and approaching, as the Yankees would say, from the nor’east. Every now and then Fred glanced toward the horizon and before long it was apparent that the fog was moving toward shore more rapidly and more encompassing than we initially thought.

Reluctantly the decision to turn homeward was made and we started off, slowly savoring our last minutes in the cool air, begrudging the fact that our refreshment was to be cut short. Turning to check on the gray mass that steadily approached, Fred muttered a brief obscenity. It did not take major calculations to realize the fog had engaged us in an unsolicited race to the shore. Fred grasped the throttle and shoved it into high speed and the boat leaped forward under his command.

I looked at my nearly six-foot tall, lean, thirty-eight year old husband with his prematurely receding hairline and handsome tanned face. It amused and puzzled me that he could grow vast quantities of dark brown hair everywhere but on his head. I smiled at my slightly erogenous thoughts. After nineteen years of marriage he still appealed to me as I did to him. His blue gray eyes, hidden behind brown tortoise shell sunglasses gazed ahead with 20/20 vision. I admired him and I admired his eyes. My own were so myopic that I depended on my glasses from the minute I woke up each morning until I turned the light out at night.

We were different in other ways too. He chose the route of our lives and where he led the children and I happily followed. We felt safe when he was nearby and he was seldom far away. He was the capable captain of our ‘ship,’ our family leader and protector. My smile grew broader and as he felt my eyes on him, he turned and met my gaze, returning the smile and probably some slightly erogenous thoughts of his own. He always thought I was beautiful and never let a day pass without telling me so. I knew that I was not, but I liked the idea that he thought I was. I appreciated that he made me feel attractive, intelligent and loved.

As we approached land, Fred slowly guided us through the hazardous barnacle and seaweed covered outcroppings of rock that protruded from the deep blue blackness of the cold Atlantic Ocean. The rocks provided refuge for sleek long-necked cormorants and fat gray and white seagulls at low tide, but could rip a hole in the bottom of a boat in an instant, when they lurked menacingly under the surface of the rising tide. It had happened many times to boats that ignored the channel markers and took short cuts to the harbor entrance.

The bells of the channel marker buoys dinged and clanged around us as the rocks and the lighthouse became lost in the fog. As always I felt secure and safe with Fred at the helm of our boat and our lives, as he had been since the day we were married. I liked the deep droning tone of the foghorn as it blasted out its 1-4-3 warning to one and all. One blast followed by a pause, then four more, another pause, and three more. Everyone knew the short message translated to I-l-o-v-e-y-o-u and, Minot’s Light was nicknamed by all, the ‘I Love You Lighthouse.’

The powerful throbbing sounds of the motor, the lapping of the water against the hull, the seagulls screeching above, and the love messages in the distance were music in my ears. I was oblivious to the dense gray fog overtaking us, until it obliterated everything but the boat that we were in, from sight. Never bothering to learn how to drive the boat, I just leaned back as was my custom, closed my eyes and trusted Fred to get us safely home.

Belatedly I realized that Fred could no longer navigate through the shrouded maze of lobster buoys and rocks without my assistance. His soft litany of whispered exasperation made it obvious. He wouldn’t disturb me to ask for my help, but finally I had received the message. Dragging myself out of my comfortable seat, I climbed up on the bow and carefully directed our path as he steered our boat toward the shelter of the small harbor.

A half hour later, safely at the mooring, the canvas up and the windows zipped in place, Fred squeezed the air horn three ear-piercing times. A few minutes later we heard the approaching rumble of the yacht club launch which emerged from the soupy grayness, pulling alongside. The young captain helped us board, and we headed slowly to the dock. Life was pleasant again with the uneasy experience behind us.

Getting caught in the fog that day was scary and I was relieved to have Fred in charge. As always Fred drove and I rode. Fred directed and I reacted. It didn’t occur to me that I might assume my full share of responsibility until we were immersed in the myriad problems that surrounded us, as the fog did that day.

We could not have guessed that there would ever be a time when Fred would need my assistance in every facet of his life. At that time he didn’t realize that he needed help, or maybe he was simply too proud to ask for it. He never changed. If I was slow to react to his needs, certainly it was because neither of us wanted to acknowledge that so much could go so unimaginably wrong.

How, why, or when Parkinson’s disease crept stealthily into our lives remains quite unclear. I do know it was there many years before we received the diagnosis in January 1986, which was the pivotal moment in time that marked the end of life as we had come to know it. For thirty-four years our lives revolved around our three children, the insurance agency and real estate business, our volunteer work and each other. Most of those years were happy ones, but for Fred the eight or ten years preceding 1986 were invaded by an advancing, then retreating, relentless army of far-reaching and unconnected ailments and complaints.

By the mid 1970’s our attention began to be diverted with increasing frequency by small frustrations that would years later be recognized as early symptoms of the insidious nameless stranger that had entered our lives. As in the poem by Carl Sandburg, it was a fog that crept in on little cat feet and it played with us and fooled us with its myriad symptoms until we were finally forced to acknowledge what could not be excused or denied any longer. The small irritating problems were pieces of a much larger puzzle. The fog of neurological disease had stealthily and relentlessly enveloped us when we least expected hideous complications in our lives. Month by month, week by week our complacent and pleasurable lifestyle slowly eroded away, as the fog rolled softly around us refusing to move on.

Looking back, I remember Fred’s’ increasing clumsiness, the way he tripped over his feet, the rugs and everything else in sight. He had trouble with his hands; an exercise as simple as changing a light bulb became a laughable chore. We convinced ourselves that he was simply uncoordinated and I, more often than not, would point it out to him, saying over and over again, Fred, what IS the matter with you? sometimes quietly muttering My GOD you are clumsy! The thought that something was physically wrong never crossed our minds. His own assessment was that he was ‘all thumbs.’

Sometimes Fred’s complaints seemed humorous, as in I wrote a long note to myself this morning and now I can’t read it… Helen, his secretary, facing the problem on a daily basis, would try valiantly to decipher his scratchy handwriting, but often she would be as baffled as he was.

Within our family unit work hard and play hard would have been our motto, had we had one. We expected our children to do well in school and receive a college degree, which neither of us had achieved. In the wintertime we played at our small old farmhouse in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Weekends were filled with family and our teenage children and their friends and we all were regulars at the nearby ski slope. During the summer months the kids taught swimming lessons in our backyard pool to earn their cars and spending money. They were excellent skiers, swimmers, scuba divers and sailors. While this was going on I served on the board of the Social Service League, did volunteer work, and served as president of the large, active Cohasset Community Garden Club. We were both involved in Cub Scouting and Fred was the president of the Cohasset Historical Society and the local Chamber of Commerce among many other things.

Our daughter Nancy graduated from Skidmore College in 1976, after four years of academic success, travel and fun. Mark graduated from prep school the same year and entered Massachusetts Maritime Academy and our youngest child, Freddy, entered the same prep school as a freshman. With this heavy financial burden and the somewhat more than typical, worrisome antics of two teenage sons, Fred’s deepening depression and exhaustion over those few years could easily be explained away.

We thought we were good parents, but during the decade of the late sixties to the late seventies the changes in society as we had known it were increasingly apparent. Our parenting skills were put to the test time and again. Children were rebelling all around us. Drugs infiltrated the schools and the town. As the Vietnam War escalated it claimed the sons of two of our friends. People were flying around in space and walking on the moon. A friend’s sixteen-year-old daughter contracted genital herpes, a disease I had never even heard of, at the infamous rock concert at Woodstock. We thought we spotted a flying saucer one dark winter night. It seemed as though the world was spinning out of control. Life was far from what we had anticipated when I married Airman Basic Frederic Wood, four months after his high school graduation.

When odd little cigarettes and pipes showed up in our teen-age son’s pockets I looked the other way. As I placed the paraphernalia in a blue and white vase that sat conveniently on a shelf in the laundry room, I told myself I would deal with it tomorrow. When Fred found marijuana plants growing in the window boxes at the office, right in the center of town, I begged him to bring some home so I could see what the plant looked like. Instead of throwing them away, I quietly planted twelve, or a few more, of the plants in my vegetable garden where they flourished. Three or four were placed in a large decorative pot on the pool deck. It didn’t occur to me that I was breaking the law, or setting a poor example to my children.

I simply felt deliciously ‘in the moment.’ The joke ended up being on me. Sometime late that fall I went to the garden to clean it up for the winter, and found my plants had already been ‘harvested.’ Not wishing to hear the answer to the obvious question, I didn’t ask the boys what had happened to the crop. Unable to handle the situation, I said and did nothing.

It was apparent this was not the same atmosphere in which Fred and I had grown up. We felt inadequate and were confused by the changes and challenges of the world around us. It was easy to dismiss Fred’s general malaise and his trips to the doctor for unspecified ailments and symptoms as hypochondria. At the same time, my own body was giving me significant problems and I underwent two major surgeries and a minor one over a three-year period. So I teased Fred about being a hypochondriac, concentrated on my own ailments, and then allowed my attention to become diverted by whatever crisis happened next. I was playing tag with our lives and unless I was ‘it’ I appeared to be oblivious to the problem that was really there. It seemed I would do anything to avoid conflict and confrontation.

As I began to feel increasingly uneasy during the late 1970’s, Fred regularly reassured me that he could and would handle the financial problems that had begun to crop up; an overdue tuition bill, phone bill, mortgage payment. First we refinanced our nearly paid-for home. Next it was the antique building in which we had our office. Finally the little farmhouse in New Hampshire was encumbered with a mortgage four times the amount we had paid for it. Several months after each ‘fix’ the phone calls started again. As our mortgage debt grew to an unmanageable height, I waited for the right moment to casually mention that we had received a call from a bank or creditor. Fred always replied I’ll take care of it tomorrow… no problem, and he would, but after a while I began to dread the ringing of the phone. It seemed as though the entire world was going to hell and so were we.

One day I received a call from a friend who had seen Fred sleeping in his car at Nantasket Beach, a few miles from our office and home, at one o’clock in the afternoon. Another time someone told me they could see him through the large picture window of his office sound asleep at his desk. Both people were concerned, wondering what was wrong. The behavior was totally out of character and they knew it. Fred was hurt and offended that friends would bring what he described as gossip, to my attention.

Having no other explanation for what was happening to us, I decided he was having a mid-life crisis. Maybe, as unlikely as it could be, he was having an affair. I confided in a close friend who had also begun to notice the changes in him, telling her that his mistress might be his secretary, a woman we both admired and liked. As unbelievable as it seemed, we agreed it was a possibility. She was the glue that was holding the office together. She was also pretty, intelligent, kind and the person who he relied on more and more for advice as he began his mysterious decline.

The puzzle pieces did not fit. He still treated me lovingly and with warmth, never letting a day go by without telling me that he loved me. Many of my friends compared his unusual and unfailingly thoughtful demeanor to their own husband’s occasional or constant thoughtlessness. Repeating my constant pattern of avoiding confrontation and conflict, I decided not to discuss my suspicions with him or anyone else. Looking back it is hard to believe I was so weak.

The mortgages were Band-Aids serving to rid us of some of the old bills while increasing the intensity of the bills to be paid. In June of 1980 Mark graduated from Massachusetts Maritime Academy and Freddy prepared to go off to his freshman year at the University of Massachusetts. After long and agonizing consideration, we decided to sell the one hundred and fifty year old, eleven-room house we had moved to when our daughter, Nancy, was three and Fred was discharged from the Air Force. In many ways Fred and I had grown up in the house that we bought at age twenty-two. Over half of our lives had been spent there. All of our children were distraught. Their entire lives had been spent in the rambling home where they intimately knew every inch of the house and barn, every bush and tree on the expansive lawn and in the neighboring field and woods. Motivated by fear, I convinced Fred that a smaller house with smaller bills would help us regain some financial stability. It was a simplistic, practical, and wrenching decision. It was also one of the first times that I insisted we ‘do it’ my way., but far from the last!

Not long after we decided to