Dr. Barry Conant, an avid Outer Cape Cod fisherman and a passionate family doctor, frequently said that one can fish safely on the Brewster flats on Outer Cape Cod for two hours—an hour before and after low tide—without having to worry. The tide, as it is with aging, creeps in deceptively, he used to say.

The tide crept in on Dr. Conant, after a long, courageous battle with pancreatic cancer. He died January 30 at age 66. His legacy is now a part of Cape Cod Bay’s horizon on a brilliant sunset. As Hemingway would say: the old man and the sea.

Years ago, I wrote this piece about Barry about his resolve under duress to fight on—a lesson for all of us.

The maudlin wake of Coronavirus worldwide—the millions of infections, the thousands and thousands of deaths, the mounting causalities still to come, the growing millions of millions unemployed—is explosively reshaping our universe today, perhaps in some ways not seen since the Big Bang. The devastation has caused us to rethink life in fundamental ways. Many now ponder: What else have we missed, what have we learned from all this?

I’m sitting today with an old friend, Margaret Rice Moir, who recently lost her husband, Rob, to Alzheimer’s. In the last two years, I’ve lost six close friends—among the many—to Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, leaving lots of spouses without mates, children without parents, and grandchildren with fewer loved ones to hold them. Margaret has something penetrating to say to me now…

The best of humanity can be found in the worst of times. We see this today on the front lines of the Coronavirus pandemic—acts of noble kindness, often found in unexpected places. At a time when we are told to separate, compassion is bringing us closer together. Let us hope this is the new normal—the bottling of benevolence.

The "Lunch Ladies" of Outer Cape Cod are pitching in, as many around the country, in helping to feed the hungry, from young children to seniors, while bracing from Coronavirus. From first responders to the “Lunch Ladies,” we all live in a pretty caring country…

My mother, Virginia, loved yellow – the color of the mind and the intellect, the third chakra in the solar plexus, representing personal power and spark. Yellow is the hue, most visible of all, of memory, hope, happiness, and enlightenment. Yellow inspires the dreamer, encourages the seeker. My mom's rapture with yellow was an upward, heavenly turn in her stages of grief. Yellow also is a color of angels, and in scripture it symbolizes a change for the better. My mom, who died of Alzheimer's in a bruising battle with the disease, believed in angels.

Mother’s Day has a way of bringing us back to the womb, providing prospective beyond a Hallmark card or bouquet of flowers—flashes of reflection, a carousel of streaming images on an old-school slide projector embedded in the mind. The images keep flashing beyond the day. Memories abound.

A sea of late spring dandelions outside my barn is leaning toward Cape Cod Bay in a stiff wind, a wave of yellow. I am drawn to the cluster. The dandelion—a French derivative for “dent de lion,” the tooth of a lion, with its sharp yellow leaves and believed to date back 30 million years— is born as a flower, becomes a weed, and dies slowly from the head down… And so it is with Alzheimer’s.

Memories abound beyond a prized snapshot—in Back To the Future, the photograph fades. While memory is defined by the experts as the brain’s facility to encode, store, and retrieve moments and information, the definition is far deeper than that.

This pillaging disease—one that can take a quarter century or more to run its deadly course, akin to having a sliver of your brain shaved every day—knows no demographic, no race, color, political party, or any other persuasion. Sadly, it affects women, Hispanics, and African Americans in far greater numbers than white Irish guys like me. But a death is just that—a death, resulting in partners without lovers, spouses without mates, children without parents, grandchildren with fewer loved ones to hold them. In the last several months, I’ve lost five close friends to this disease.

Changing a play at the family scrimmage line is an intense ordeal, fraught with anxiety. Several years ago I had to call an audible, telling my children I was diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer’s and carried a key marker gene (link is external)--the fifth family member to battle dementia. Now I had to break the news that our 14-year-old family dog, a stunning, loyal yellow Lab named Sox, who had defined us with unremitting faith, hope, and love, and was my guidepost in this disease, was going to die that night. Failing kidneys, internal bleeding and neurological complications were overcoming Sox, and I was to be the executioner.

The bite of the black dog can be worse than its bark. To some, the black dog is man's best friend, a faithful companion in the rear of a pickup truck. To others it is a metaphor for the shadows of depression… All I know is that I can't sleep at night, haunted by demons of depression that keep me captive in the early hours of the morning.

The stairwell seemed to have no ending, an abyss of a downward spiral. At the bottom, there was no lobby, just white sheets draped over furniture, empty room after empty room. The place had the smell of mildew, as if someone had tried to extinguish the flames of hell. My mind was racing. I was lost; delusions were in full gait. I ran up to the next floor. Same frightful panorama. My cell phone couldn’t connect, no signal. Dammit, no signal! Can you hear me now, I cried within? In a flash, Le Montreux Palace had become the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and I was writer Jack Torrance seeking haunting solitude to create. “All work and no play make Greggie a dull boy...”


“You’re not getting out of this,” my doctors tell me. So I try to fight back, stay locked-in as a missile is on target, to slow the progression of this disease. But “locked in” likewise is a medical disorder in which an individual who cannot speak because of paralysis communicates through a blink of an eye. Some days, I find myself between definitions—using every available memory device and strategy, cerebral and handheld, to communicate.

Like all of us, I will die without the answers, but I will run the race of knowledge. In the process, I seek redemption from my enemies, family, friends, and from God, or however one defines the universe or omnipresent. I’m hoping redemption is in my quiver, as I’ve come to realize on the backside of my 60s, that I’m a bigger transgressor than most, having committed every sin imaginable, other than murder and adultery, and having been tested in both. I’m no Puritan, no altar boy, just a guy striving beyond my grasp for what is real, for faith. Alzheimer’s has brought me to this place—pursuit of truth, wherever that takes me. And I’ve come to understand that if you want redemption, you have to give it.

At 78, there are a lot of miles on Bob Bertschy, who, as a lanky young ballplayer, crouched behind home plate, wearing the “tools of ignorance,” as a catcher with the Los Angeles Dodgers organization…A man of strong faith, Bob straddles this life and the next, seeing things beyond the view of others, often times seeing things that aren’t there. Frequently, he notices strangers lurking in the house—illusions from his disease. Then he’ll spot his golf bag in the corner with thick wool head covers for his drivers. One day, having one of his hallucinations, he yelled at his wife, saying, “There are a bunch of midgets over there staring at me! What the hell are they doing here?”