Jeff Gill
Forgetting is the least of the problems
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Looking ahead to this week, I had thought I’d be writing about the fifth anniversary of the onset of COVID as a social factor in the United States, and the lasting impacts on church and community life.
That will keep. There’s plenty to say and time to say it later.
What changed my course was a surge of chatter around the recent deaths of Betsy Arakawa and her husband, Gene Hackman, in Santa Fe. Admittedly, the scene in their hilltop mansion was unusual, so there was an autopsy. Many of us thought signs led to carbon monoxide poisoning with a faulty heater, but we were wrong.
The tragic details of the inquest showed the 65 year old wife died first of a respiratory infection, and the 95 year old actor died perhaps a week or more later. Friends said Gene Hackman’s condition, which the autopsy confirmed to have been worsened by Alzheimer’s disease, had gotten visibly worse in just the last few months.
Anyone saying "the story around the Hackman deaths doesn't add up" is telling me they've not dealt directly at length with family members having cognitive decline or Alzheimers. It’s not just about forgetting things. It’s about a global change in perception that has to be lived with to understand.
If I had died at any point in my father-in-law's last two years, certainly if I was upstairs, in the basement, or out of the house, and I didn’t have a wife living elsewhere to check on ME, he would have puttered along with minimal consumption of beverages for another week or two or even three. His demise in that scenario would have been attributed to a mix of dementia, heart disease, and lack of nutrition. Just like Gene Hackman’s death.
When my father died five years ago, let's just say my mother's behavior in the immediate aftermath of finding his body were our first indication that there was something cognitively awry with her. It all made no sense until you realized her executive functions & short-term memory were fried.
The tragedy in New Mexico is that for all their wealth & material security & social status, there wasn't anyone else in the mix enough to notice what had happened until the groundskeeper came by on their maintenance schedule.
Having said that, I have nothing but sympathy for Hackman’s adult children. There but for the grace of God, etc. My wife and I knew her father had challenges beyond the physical as he approached 90, but the resistance, and yes, the skillful evasions even in the teeth of obvious cognitive headwinds: it was hard. He just wanted to be left alone.
And my father: he had all sorts of plans and contingencies… based on dying in Indiana, where they were by his demise spending 5 months out of 12. So of course what happens? He died in Texas. Which he didn’t plan on. I’m sure the 30 year younger wife in Santa Fe thought “Gene will die first, and then…” Except life is funny & ghastly that way. And I know of half a dozen stories like that without even working at it.
We plan, when we do, for the most likely outcomes (and too often not even those). Contingency planning for implausible, but all possible outcomes? We put them in the lockbox of “never gonna happen.” Which turns out to be a container akin to a wet paper bag. Reality rips right through it.
Every time I go to a big box store or grocery shopping, I see people who make me wonder "is anyone checking in on them more than once a month or so?" And I fear I know the answer.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he knows this is a bleak ending, but sometimes that's where we have to go. Tell him what the solution is at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
