FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ATLANTA, GEORGIA

Sermon by Dr. George Bryant Wirth

Disability Awareness Sunday

April 29, 2007

MY UNCLE BILL – DEALING WITH ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE

Scripture: II Corinthians 4:7-18

I

In his book “The Longing for Home,” Frederick Buechner begins the first chapter with this profound reflection:

“The word ‘home’ summons up a place – more specifically a house within that place – which you have rich and complex feelings about, a place where you feel, or did feel once, uniquely at home, which is to say a place where you feel you belong and which in some sense belongs to you, a place where you feel that all is somehow ultimately well even if things aren’t going all that well at any given moment. To think about home eventually leads you to think back to your childhood home, the place where your life started, the place which off and on throughout your life you keep going back to if only in dreams and memories…” (From “The Longing for Home” by Frederick Buechner, Harper Collins Publishers, 1996, pages 7-8)

I think most all of us have a place like that, deeply embedded in the recesses of our hearts and minds, the house and the hometown where we grew up as children, and the people who were there with us, family members and friends, some of whom are gone now while others still remain.

That’s what I was thinking about and remembering just two weekends ago as Barbara, our daughter Aly and I headed out toward the eastern tip of Long Island to my “home-place” called Sag Harbor.

I had been invited to preach at the Stony Brook School where I spent part of my teenage years, and Sag Harbor is another two hours drive from there (which is why it’s called “Long” Island!) So we rented a car and took a drive down memory lane, seeing the old Victorian manse where my family lived in the 1950’s, the Old Whaler’s Presbyterian Church which my father served as pastor, the Pierson School where I began my education, and the lovely and largely unchanged village which sits there just south of the Long Island Sound and a few miles north of the Atlantic Ocean.

It was nostalgic for me to go back there where I hadn’t been for twenty years. And then something happened, something which actually changed the title of this sermon: “Dealing With Alzheimer’s Disease.” Driving back toward Stony Brook, I saw the road sign which said “East Moriches,” right there nearby to Westhampton, and that was where my Uncle Bill, Aunt Marion and cousins Susan and Brud Morrison once lived during the same time that the Wirths were in Sag Harbor.

Uncle Bill was my mother’s brother and the only uncle I’ve ever had. Born in 1923, he became a great athlete and played football at Syracuse University before enlisting in the Army Air Corps. During the Second World War, he was a bombardier on B17’s and flew 31 missions over Europe. When he came home and married my Aunt Marion, they were blessed with two children, Susan and Brud, and I remember the wonderful times that we all spent together during holidays and summer seasons, including some great adventures out on the water in my Uncle Bill’s Cabin Cruiser.

I admired and looked up to him and was grateful for the interest which he showed in me, especially as we grew older and discovered our mutual passion for hunting and fishing.

He was a “take-charge” kind of man who became a successful and respected executive with the H.O. Penn Machinery Company, a division of the Caterpillar Corporation. When he retired to the town of Kinderhook, a suburb of Albany, New York, he had more time to travel and enjoy the outdoors, to sit on the Boards of his company, the local bank, library and church vestry, and to be with his wife and children and grandchildren whom he loved deeply.

II

But then, sometime in the mid 1990’s, my Aunt Marion began to notice that Uncle Bill was forgetting things and losing his train of thought in conversations. So they went to the doctor for an examination, then to the hospital for further tests, and before too long it was determined that my Uncle Bill had Alzheimer’s Disease.

As his family circled the wagons and walked alongside him day by day, my Uncle Bill’s mind and memory began to gradually slip away. There were moments of great joy and celebration, mixed with periods of sadness and frustration, for nothing could be done to cure the disease, other than trying to slow it down with physical therapy and medication.

My sister Priscilla and I drove from Akron, Ohio to visit Uncle Bill and Aunt Marion in the summer of 2003. I have some photographs here of our time together – he was still walking and talking and smiling and aware that we were there, but unable to communicate in a meaningful way. I brought him a copy of our church history book and as he unwrapped it, he found a picture of our sanctuary and then discovered a snapshot of me. He looked across the room to where I was sitting, pointed at the page and then in my direction, somehow indicating that he had made the connection. And that was the last time I saw my Uncle Bill alive.

My aunt, cousins, the grandchildren and some close friends, supported by the doctors, caregivers and hospice nurses, stayed close by to him until the end, and he died peacefully last summer on June 29, surrounded by a circle of love that was deep and wide. The Memorial Service was held in the St. Paul’s Episcopal Church and I was honored to be asked to read the scripture and preach the sermon as we gave William Bedell Morrison back to God after 83 years of life on this earth.

I think the service would have pleased my Uncle Bill, especially using the old Book of Common Prayer. But one thing could have been upsetting to him. At the graveside, as we laid this remarkable man to rest, my Aunt Marion saw the backhoe that had dug the grave about 50 yards away, and it was made by John Deere instead of Caterpillar. My aunt whispered to her daughter Susan, “I don’t think your father would be very happy about this.” And that was when we all began to smile.

Now I tell you that story about my Uncle Bill and his family because it is not only our story, but the story of more than 10 million people across this nation today… and you can quadruple that number if you include all of the family members who are affected and involved.

Alzheimer’s Disease, named after the German neuropathologist who first diagnosed it 100 years ago (1907), is a progressive, irreversible, degenerative illness that causes deterioration of the brain, creating along the way a condition known as “dementia” (From “When Alzheimer’s Strikes” by Dr. Stephen Sapp, Desert Ministries, 1996, page 5).

And although there are now some medications that can slow this disease down, we still don’t know the cause of Alzheimer’s and neither have we been able to discover the cure.

The symptoms, according to this helpful booklet “When Alzheimer’s Disease Strikes,” are as follows:

1. Memory loss

2. Inability to learn

3. Difficulty with language

4. Loss of the ability to perform various actions and movements

5. Personality changes and mood swings

6. Disorientation to time and place

7. Loss of judgment

8. Hallucinations and delusions

9. Agitation, restlessness, wandering and disruption of the sleep cycle (ibid, pages 12-17)

Those are the symptoms for the person who is diagnosed with this disease, and the list and range of emotions with which family members have to struggle is also significant, including:

· Role reversals of adult sons and daughters with their aging and ailing parents

· Sorrow and grief as your loved one suffering with Alzheimer’s gradually fades away

· Guilt at not being able to do more, even though we know there isn’t a cure

· Anger and frustration at the unfairness of it all

· A sense of helplessness and isolation as the disease progresses

Many of you in this sanctuary today, and many more who are tuned in through radio and television, know personally what those symptoms and the range of emotions are all about, because you have been there, and you might be there right now.

III

And that is where we, as people of faith, can know beyond the shadow of a doubt that there are resources available to us which can help us go on instead of giving up as we trust our lives and our loved ones to the Lord.

The text which I have chosen today offers us the help and hope we need to find a way to deal with Alzheimer’s Disease. The Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians, saying that:

…We have this treasure in clay jars, so that it might be clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies…

So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day…

(II Corinthians 4:7-12, 16)

You see, those first century Christians were up against painful suffering and all sorts and conditions of persecution and affliction. Paul was telling them, and all of us still today, that we don’t face those trials alone.

How do we know that’s so? Because God, through the love of His Son our Savior Jesus and by the power of His Holy Spirit, has promised to come alongside us and to provide us with strength and endurance every step of the way. His power to lift us up and help us go on is greater than anything that would knock us down and cause us to quit.

Moreover, the Lord has given us great resources of the community of faith – the church – through people who pray for us, bring meals to the door, and come sit with us in hospitals and nursing homes; and caregivers, Stephen Ministers, pastors and fellow parishioners who are available day and night to walk beside us through the valley of the shadow.

And because Alzheimer’s Disease cannot be cured, after all that we have endured, when the end of the journey finally comes, there are bothers and sisters in the family of faith who will be there to help us let go of the one we love and give them back to the Lord of Eternal Life.

That’s how it happened for my Uncle Bill, who discovered with Aunt Marion and the rest of their family and friends that “Earth has no sorrows that heaven cannot heal” (Sir Thomas Moore). And so it can be for you and for me as we deal with the reality of Alzheimer’s Disease.

CONCLUSION

Dr. John Buchanan, pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago will be preaching here next January for our Urban Ministry Conference. He has preached here before and there is a powerful story at the end of his book “Being Church, Becoming Community” about a woman named Evelyn who had Alzheimer’s and had just died at the age of 99. This is the way John Buchanan remembered her:

“Several years ago when she was still able to walk, Evelyn wandered out the front door of the nursing home. The staff were frantic. She was gone for several hours on a very hot summer afternoon. Because our ministers are regular visitors in that nursing home, the receptionist remembered Evelyn’s connection to Fourth Church. She called us to see if we knew where she was and one of the pastors on our staff knew exactly where to go. We found her in the sanctuary – always open during the day – sitting alone in her pew, the pew she had occupied with her family as a little girl, the pew where she had sat beside her husband for 50 years, the pew she had been in for 85 years until moving to the nursing home. She was confused and overcome with heat, but Evelyn remembered the church and she found it and she was found in it.

Tomorrow we will celebrate her life and God’s love for her in the church, the family of faith.”

That’s the greatest promise of all and it’s a vision that was actually seen in his mind’s eye by the Apostle Paul who wrote these words to the Corinthians which still speak to us today: So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal. (II Corinthians 4:16-18)

And that’s the vision God has given to all of us who believe in Him!

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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