What’s out where? My Memoir’s book proposal has been emailed to an agent. Now to do research for other agents and publishers. Here is part of the Introduction to Memoir from an Honest Caregiver. Are you interested in knowing when it’s published?
Introduction
One weekday morning Bill walked into the kitchen wearing only his jockey shorts and T-shirt. This surprising scene happened two years after moving to Indianapolis and buying a house together with our daughter and her husband, Becky and Paul Gearhart. Bill held two pairs of socks in his hands and asked which ones he should wear―black or white. My immediate reaction was due to fear, for our houseguest might find my husband in his underwear. I told Bill it didn’t matter; he could decide which socks he wanted. This didn’t solve his dilemma, for he could not choose.
This episode illustrates how Alzheimer’s disease affected my husband and how I reacted on the spot. You’ll read about our journey and view the stages of dementia caregivers experience. To our family and friends, be warned. You will see Bill as different, radically changed, not how you knew him (or me).
I introduce you to my husband before dementia began to control our lives. Bill grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana, the third of four children by a Mississippi-born couple holding modest jobs. His father worked in the railroad yard and his mother held a filing job in the basement of Charity Hospital. In spite of the family’s meager income, all three sons graduated from college.
Bill stayed home to attend Tulane University, earning a BA degree with a major in philosophy and a minor in English. He graduated in 1957, also the year we got married in Mobile, Alabama, after I graduated from Murphy High School.
Four years prior, Bill, as a senior in high school, distinctly heard God’s call to preach. Upon graduation from Tulane, Bill’s Uncle Bud, a Methodist pastor, helped him secure an appointment as a supply pastor for a small church in North Biloxi, Mississippi.
I sum up Bill’s further educational history. He received a BD and ThM from Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky, in 1963 and 1965. Then at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, he earned a PhD in 1973, with a major in Hebrew Linguistics. For two years Bill taught at Asbury Theological Seminary and moved to Asbury College (University) as professor of Bible and Greek until 1989 when he accepted a pastorate in Terre Haute, Indiana, at World Gospel Church (WGC).
With this background, you can compare Bill as professor and pastor with what he later became. After 19 years as pastor of WGC, Bill retired in 2008. In July of 2010 he spent 24 days in the hospital with Legionnaire’s disease. Dementia set in soon after.
While you view various stages Bill traveled through, you are also in my head as I learned about myself. This is my story––how I connected with and cared for my husband. If you are now a caregiver for a loved one or soon to see that as your role, our journeys may relate.
For me, his caregiver, the basic loss became Bill as he used to be, for my expectations from him no longer held reality. Add my independence and control, along with loss of connections with family and friends.
Every good skit, play, story, or book needs a beginning, middle, and ending. It began after Bill’s hospital stay with Legionnaire’s disease. Writing in my journals about the messy middle of five years, I did not know how or when this memoir would close. The process of the ending was brief. The end came on the seventh of March 2024 when Bill, after two weeks of in-home hospice care, breathed his last. A new chapter began with my grief journey, but I’ve know God’s peace.
Ann Coker 