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TwitThisA 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.
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