On entering the room, I began to weep.  For the first time in many years, I could not stop crying. The sight of my friend Jack lying on a bed, his eyes closed, his mouth open wide, and him obviously dying caught me by surprise. I had come to the Veteran’s Hospital knowing of his entering into crisis but I did not expect to see him this much changed.

Next to him in that narrow room stood a priest saying prayers that go with the Anointing of the Sick. Around the bed stood members of Jack’s family –  – his wife, their sons, and one daughter-in-law, all of them holding hands as they joined in the prayers and blessings. Seeing them stirred my emotions further, as I felt solidarity with them in our common loss.

My two companions and I, arriving late, were embraced and made to feel part of this community of shared grief. We extended our hands in the prayer circle and also received the priest’s blessing. He consoled us by saying how good it was to have other people with him as he prayed over Jack

The pity of it! The pity of it! Those words of Shakespeare welled up in me as I looked upon my friend of six decades. He was asleep so deeply as to seem already removed from the world. The disease that had worn him out was now breaking down his last walls of resistance.

It had been a long and agonizing struggle over the last eight years or so. Alzheimer’s, at first subtle in disclosing its presence, gradually took away Jack’s power to think logically and finally his ability to recognize old friends like me and even family members. In time he had become entirely dependent on others.

He had become lost several times, so lost on one occasion that a helicopter had to be dispatched to search for him. His profession had been lost too, a legal career in which he had shown much brilliance. Finally, he could no longer stay living at home.

What had stayed with him and even grown in power, however, was the love directed toward him by his wife, grown-up sons, and other family members. With courage and devotion his wife Penny had kept coming to see him and to attend to his needs, even when his responses were not identifiable.   

The old fashioned pool in which I swim every day  reminds me of Jack and our first week as college classmates. In those days, entering freshmen had to pass a swimming test in that pool, a feat I could not have accomplished since I could not swim at all. Sizing up my situation, Jack offered to take the test for me. With my connivance, he jumped in, swam competently up and down the lane, and posed as me until I was registered. Dubious ethically, this was an act of charity on his part that I still appreciate.

We had also been classmates in high school, two among the 21 boys who entered our new school in 1943. Jack was a far stronger student than I in math and science and so beat me out academically in our last two years. Instead of being resentful, I admired his all-around ability especially his excellence in analyzing  problems and solving them with confidence.

He finished his college studies in three years and then went on to law school where he continued to excel. After a stretch of military service, he did further studies in financial accounting, preparing himself carefully for his career in a prominent Boston law firm.

I provide these details, not so much for their own interest, but because they witness to the sadness of Jack’s decline. He was intellectually sharp, a person whose overall abilities and judgment stood out. To observe the relentless stripping of these native gifts has been terribly painful, as it is in all those who suffer from this illness.

When I saw him on his deathbed, I also recognized something of the fate that awaits me and everybody else. Only some of us will get Alzheimer’s, but we all know that death lies ahead. As the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins says, “It is the blight man was born for.”

I have always believed that death does not finish human existence. Faith in resurrected life continues to form part of my response to dying. I hope for Jack to live on in what my spiritual tradition calls a place of comfort, light, and peace.

But no matter what consolation I find in this faith, to see my friend dying was unutterably sad. My tears gave expression to a sorrow I could not express otherwise. I was about to lose an old friend and that loss cut into me deeply.

Richard Griffin