Let me warn you right off the bat: This is a sad story. Very sad. But it's also an important story in a way. It's about two of the nicest people I ever met in my life — Joe and Melinda Greene, an elderly couple that lived in the apartment house next door to the home in which I grew up. A more perfectly-matched pair, you never met. They were in their eighties and had long recently celebrated sixty (that's six-oh) years of marriage when this tale begins.
Mr. Greene was retired from a career in community service and he had an entire den full of awards from organizations: Kiwanis Club, Rotary Club, Salvation Army, etc. Any local group that gives out awards for helping people had given at least one to Mr. Greene. He was a handsome man who was often mistaken for the distinguished actor Alan Napier, best known for playing Alfred the Butler on the sixties Batman TV show. Melinda — a woman of incredible, constant cheer — was occasionally mistaken for the fine comedienne, Pat Carroll. I don't have a photo of the Greenes so just to give you some sort of visual, here are pics of Alan Napier and Pat Carroll…
Mr. Greene had spent most of his life helping people. Mrs. Greene had spent most of her life helping him and running their home. They were just great neighbors, great folks to be around.
Not long before dark each evening, Mr. Greene took a long walk around the neighborhood and I would often run into him and chat about this or that. I was around seventeen years old when the following transpired. It was just before the sun went all the way down. I was outside and Mr. Greene came along…but he didn't say, "Good evening, Mark," as he usually did. Instead, he said, "I was always born on Tuesday."
I stared at him, puzzled, trying to figure out what that meant. Then he said it again: "I was always born on Tuesday." What the heck did that mean?
He was a smart man so I knew it had to mean something, right? But he said it a few more times and it was the words plus the way he said them that caused a sickening chill to course through my body. It happened the instant I realized what it meant. It meant Mr. Greene — the delightful, distinguished Mr. Greene — was losing his mind.
Over the next week, it became obvious and undeniable. I'd run into him, there'd be a bit of coherent speech…and then his nouns and verbs would collide in utter chaos. By the end of the month, he was incapable of leaving his apartment or even of coherent speech. He would mutter and chant little songs. He never spoke another actual word and there was no trace of actual thought within him, no attempt to communicate.
Doctors told Mrs. Greene that there was zero chance he would ever get better. She believed they were right and indeed, they were right.
They suggested he be placed in a nursing home for the rest of his life and well-meaning friends and relatives seconded that advice. Mrs. Greene knew that was the wisest course of action…for her. But she said, "We've been together for six decades and we took a marriage vow of "'Til death do us part.' I'm going to take care of him myself." Mr. Greene would stay at home with her. She would dress him. She would feed him. She would get him into and out of bed. She would bathe him. And this she did for months, turning into years. I didn't think it was what was best for her and maybe not even for Mr. Greene but it's what she wanted to do. Or at least what she felt she should do.
Mr. Greene stayed in bed for much of the day but every so often, he would get up and go wandering about the apartment in his pajamas, usually with the bottoms falling down, chanting his little tunes as he did. It was a third floor apartment with a great balcony. One afternoon when she was in the kitchen, Mr. Greene tried to wander out onto that balcony and she stopped him, just moments before he probably would have fallen off it. Thereafter, she kept the sliding glass door to the balcony latched at all times. Mr. Greene would walk into that closed door and while he never broke the glass, he did injure himself several times and she'd somehow get him into the car and drive him to a hospital emergency room for treatment.
After the third or fourth meeting of Mr. Greene's face with the door, she asked me to come over and put decals all over the latter. I didn't have any or know where to get any that were appropriate to their decor. All I had were Superman and Captain America decals. She said, "I don't care. I just need decals on that door and I need them right away." So I went over and stuck comic book characters all over the sliding door to the balcony. They apparently lessened but did not eliminate the problem of Mr. Greene walking into the door.
She'd call every now and then for another kind of assistance. All day, she moved him around to change his pajamas, wash him, get him onto the toilet, etc. Mr. Greene was taller than I was then and I was over six feet tall. Mrs. Greene barely topped five feet and she was into her eighties. I still don't understand how she could handle him at all but whatever magic she possessed, it often failed her late in the day. That's when she would call our house and ask, in an "I don't want to be a bother" way if possibly, just maybe, I had time to come over and give her a bit of a hand?
If I was home, I rushed over. If I wasn't and I later heard she'd called, I felt badly but somehow, she managed without me. What had usually happened was that Mr. Greene had slipped off the toilet and was on the bathroom floor, wedged between the toilet and the sink…and she just plain didn't have the strength to get him up. I'd assist and together, we'd get him up and into bed. And then she'd give me the cookies or brownies.
In addition to all else she had to do, Mrs. Greene would bake cookies or brownies from scratch every day…rewards to give me and others she called upon. I'd tell her thank you but it wasn't necessary to do that. I was glad to come over and help her anytime she needed a hand, no baked goods required. She did not stop. She always had fresh cookies or brownies for me. She'd even learned that I was allergic to walnuts and she'd usually bake two batches: One with walnuts for others; one without for me.
This went on for about three years in real time, ten or more on Mrs. Greene's face and body. She was around 81 when her beloved went hopelessly senile around 1969. She looked well into her nineties when he finally died in '72. I began to think she needed someone like her old self to take care of her current self.
Everyone in the neighborhood said a collective "Thank God" when he passed in his sleep one night. There was nothing to be sad about. We'd lost the Mr. Greene we all loved years before.
We'd all been horrified over what keeping him at home and technically alive had done to her. My family had an even clearer, more chilling picture because we were the closest to them and also my father did their taxes and helped with some of their other financial paperwork. When Mr. Greene's powers of speech and thought had disintegrated, they'd had a decent sum of money in the bank — enough that if he'd died then and there, his widow could have lived comfortably for the rest of her natural life. Even with insurance, much of that money had been spent on treatments, home medical equipment, nurse visits, ambulances, remodelling the apartment for Mr. Greene's safety, etc. One evening when my father ran down an accounting of the Greenes' expenses for me and my mother, I made a feeble joke by adding, "…and twenty thousand dollars for cookie ingredients."
As it was, she had enough money to last her the rest of her life but only because she died a few months after he did. You will never convince me that taking care of him night and day as she did didn't lop off a decade or so from her lifespan.
A few years later, a physician named Dr. Jack Kevorkian came to prominence in the news for his advocacy of, and occasional participation in, Assisted Suicide. At first, a lot of people, myself included, thought it was a great topic for jokes. A doctor who killed his patients? That was one of the easiest topics ever handed to Johnny Carson's monologue writers. And Dr. Kevorkian sometimes helped the ridicule along with little attention-getting stunts and with quotes that made him seem unserious. Eventually though, some of us realized that Dr. Kevorkian was quite serious about a serious topic. We all believe, or like to think we believe, in the Sanctity of Life. You ask your average person on the street, "Should everything possible be done to prolong life?" and the knee-jerk, instant response of 99% or more will be, "Of course."
Still, Dr. Kevorkian brought an important, oft-avoided question to the table of public opinion: Should the elderly and hopelessly ill have a painless, practical escape route? If "getting better" is almost certainly impossible…if all a person can see before them is living in dank hospital rooms, being in pain and causing pain for their loved ones, shouldn't there be a way for them to make the decision to end it? I recall around that time watching a TV show with the Reverend Jerry Falwell, a man I considered morally indistiguishable from his nemesis Larry Flynt in exploiting the First Amendment for profit. Falwell was answering the question with a resounding no, speaking of how only God had the right to take a life. (Of course, like many who say such things, Falwell was a big supporter of the Death Penalty and of our government killing people in other countries.)
Falwell's words made me think of the Greenes and I silently shouted back to my TV screen that there was nothing godly about keeping Mr. Greene "alive" in such a state. In a very real sense, his years of being unable to dress and feed himself were years of torturing the woman he loved and of destroying what remained of her life. Unless you had some deep hatred of your putative "loved ones," you would never want to do that to them. Never.
In the years after the Greenes left us, I didn't think a lot about these issues but now and then, when Dr. Kevorkian's latest Assisted Suicide or prosecution was in the news, you couldn't help but think about it, especially if you had aging parents, as I did. In 1991 when my father had his next-to-last heart attack, the shadows of poor Mr. Greene suddenly loomed very large in my father's life and mine. I will continue this story in the next one of these essays…and don't worry. It won't be quite as sad as this one.
