Home Front

A reporter takes on her toughest assignment: caring for Dad.

A Tough Decision

Mary Ellen Geist is making tuna sandwiches for lunch in the cozy country kitchen of her parents’ Washington, Michigan, home. She asks her dad, Woody, to toast the bread. “Okay,” says the affable 80-year-old. But then his face clouds. He turns two slices of bread over with his hands and stares at the toaster slots, baffled. Finally, the retired engineer who once designed parts for Detroit’s automobile industry looks to his daughter for help. “How do I get it in there?” he asks.

Woody Geist has Alzheimer’s disease. Mary Ellen, 51, has moved back home to help care for him. An award-winning radio news anchor, Mary Ellen had worked her way up from a small station in rural Michigan to the major markets of Los Angeles and San Francisco. In 2004 she earned the coveted afternoon anchor chair at WCBS, CBS’s flagship station in New York City. She had a six-figure salary, a Mercedes-Benz and a suitcase always packed for the next big story.

Then, in February 2005, Mary Ellen took on her most meaningful assignment, one she gave to herself. She quit her job, leaving the New York fast track and a serious boyfriend behind. She went home to lend a hand to her mother, Rosemary, who has been her father’s primary caregiver since 1992, when he was first diagnosed with the disease.

Mary Ellen arrived in Washington, a Detroit suburb, on a gray winter night and anxiously unpacked in the room where she slept as a little girl. “I thought, I’m going to be one of those weird adult kids who live in the basement, gain 300 pounds and hang out in a pink sweat suit,” she says. She began filling her days with scheduling adult day care sessions, organizing medications, helping with household chores and entertaining her dad, who could no longer read or write.

Change of Pace

His confusion was simultaneously charming and heartbreaking. One night, Mary Ellen and her parents attended a Rodin exhibit at the Detroit Institute of Arts. While everyone looked at the sculptures, Woody stared at the wall. Then, Mary Ellen remembers, “he said, ‘I’m getting tired.’ And he tried to sit down on The Thinker. The guards came running, and I’m like, ‘No, Dad, that’s The Thinker! You can’t sit on The Thinker!’”

Woody repeats himself frequently, saying over and over, “It’s good to be here. I’m just very lucky in everything.” He also whistles incessantly.

One morning, Mary Ellen woke to greet her mother, disheveled and rattled, in the hallway. “He’s whistling all night long!” her mom said. “He whistled ‘Jingle Bells’ in its entirety, then shouted ‘Merry Christmas’ in his sleep!”

While helping her mom stir up some chicken soup from her grandmother’s recipe one day, Mary Ellen smiled to herself. “I realized I was being given permission to slow down. As a reporter, you get to a point where you think, I can’t cry, I can’t feel anything. It’s like I can taste food again, feel emotions again.”

Learning to Cope

Which is to say it hurts that Woody doesn’t remember Mary Ellen’s name; he calls her Daughter. And she worries that her mother will lose herself—once a vibrant painter and art teacher with an active social life—while caring for her dad. Mary Ellen encourages her to take time away and often heads out with Woody alone. Not long ago, she splurged for $100 tickets to the Detroit Pistons so Woody could see his favorite team play, but the experience just seemed to confuse him.

Outside the stadium’s men’s room, he turned to each person waiting in line and introduced himself with a handshake—“Woody Geist, Woody Geist, Woody Geist”—thinking he was in a receiving line. When he and Mary Ellen got to their car after the game, he said, “Who won?” As she informed him that the Pistons were victorious, Mary Ellen thought, Two hundred dollars down the drain!

Woody can still dress himself, but not always correctly. Recently, Mary Ellen found him wearing socks on his hands. He isn’t always certain what shoes are either, and once, he emerged from the bedroom wearing Rosemary’s pink sweater.

She tries not to injure her father’s pride and instead plays to his strengths. “We make the bed and sing,” she says. “I vacuum, and he sings.” But of late, Woody has seemed more lost, and sometimes he panics. He feels the pulse on the side of his head and says he’s dying, or talks of planning to kill himself. “This is the kind of awareness he was not supposed to have at this stage,” says Rosemary. “The doctor said he would be fairly happy now, but that has not happened.”

There are days when both Rosemary and Mary Ellen doubt they can continue. Mary Ellen, who is writing a book about her experience, feels the tug of her career. And she wonders if coming home has just postponed the inevitable: putting Woody in a home, where he might be happier too.

Still, Mary Ellen calls the last years a gift. “There is such a feeling that wells up inside you when you put someone’s needs in front of your own.”

Cherished Time Together

For more than 40 years, Woody has been a member of the Grunyans, an a cappella jazz group. He can still sing his solos, the music somehow making a pathway through the plaque in his brain. After a recent rehearsal, Woody begins singing “Now the Day Is Over” in the car. Mary Ellen and Rosemary join in, and, in the darkness, Woody reaches across the seat to put his hand on his driver’s arm. “Glad to be with you, Daughter,” he says.

Mary Ellen reaches back. “Glad to be with you, Dad.”