A Good Year

Opening his TALE OF TWO CITIES, Charles Dickens famously said “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” He could have been talking about 1983 from my point of view. That was the year my father died, the year Terry and I celebrated our 25^th wedding anniversary with a trip to Europe, the year I got a dream job and the year I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis.

The trip to Europe was transient; 25 years of marriage gave way to 50; my father has been gone 26 years now and my dream job evaporated as the two partners in the joint venture wound up at odds with each other. But Multiple Sclerosis remains, morphing from minor inconvenience to a life-altering roller coaster of a ride as unpredictable as it is distressing. It is not a disease for the faint of heart or for anyone without a strong supportive cast. I count myself lucky on both scores. I give myself no credit for avoiding the faint of heart thing; that’s a function of hardwiring, it just IS. As for support, I am blessed with a wife who is both caring and intelligent and willing always to take the extra step to assure my safety and well-being. And three grown sons and their wives, including Joe and Ilsa next door who provide muscle and emotional help when needed.

I would, of course, rather I didn’t need the help.. Funny how life works out. When my doctor steered me to a neurologist 26 years ago to figure out why I was experiencing dizzy spells, I underwent a battery of tests. The diagnosis was Multiple Sclerosis, which sent me into gales of laughter as I puzzled over the incompetence of anyone with the temerity to suggest that I--me--might have this thing called MS—whatever that was. Other than some athletic injuries, I had been remarkably free of anything approaching illness of any kind. I was a full-fledged jock; an All City basketball player in high school, a four-year scholarship player in college. I played in the Marine Corps; I played on an industrial league team that later became Cleveland’s entry in the professional American Basketball League.

I went on with my life. My dream job had taken me to Manhattan where I was running the communication efforts for a joint venture of IBM and Merrill Lynch. We took out a second mortgage on our Ridgefield house and bought a co-op apartmentt in the city. I continued my program of running several miles every day at dawn, taking advantage of the early quiet of the city, and run up Fifth Avenue to the Park from our apartment in Murray Hill. It was a great run, a look at the city eerily quiet and virtually deserted. MS be dammed! Like fun I said. I ran in Corporate Challenge races; I ran in races through Wall St. It was a great time.

And the business was exciting. We were developing an information system for the brokerage industry that would do everything but butter a broker’s bagel It was a large scale development effort with a whole floor filled with bright young programmers working well into each night. We were a media darling and were featured in the news magazines, the New York Times and all the trade magazines.

Terry’s and my personal life was at a high. We enjoyed everything the city had to offer. Lots of off-Broadway and good neighborhood restaurants. She became the executive director of a city greening effort called the Green Guerillas. She came to know every corner of the city where there might be a vacant lot on which to start a gatden. She became well known for her expertise and was later asked to start a similar program for the NY Botanical Garden where she became executive director of the program she started called Bronx Green Up. She was in demand as a speaker and let me tag along on trips to places like Brazil and Columbia.

But there were disturbing signs for me at work: the development effort was tougher and slower than expected, the target market of the nation’s 25 largest brokerages was being slow to accept the offering of their own single largest competitor—Merrill Lynch. Then the squabbling between the partners began and on New Years Eve in 1986 we were forced to issue a one-paragraph news release about the halting of operations. We took a terrible beating in the press where we had boasted loud and often of our prowess.

It was about that time that MS began taking its toll. I was taken back by IBM and moved into a new role, but my balance and coordination had become problematic and I had to begin using a cane, which I ascribed to a running injury to anyone who asked. I got myself enrolled in a clinical trial of a new drug at Yale New Haven, which showed promise for my chronic progressive MS. I was getting uncomfortable in the high anxiety environment in which I worked as I found it increasingly difficult to get around on one cane.

Then, miracle of miracles, IBM offered an early retirement program I qualified for. I took the money and ran. That turned out to be a good move. I spent the next couple of years as a consultant putting together some needed cash for retirement. Terry kept her director’s job at the Botanical Garden. MS had begun began to gallop and traveling became a memory as I moved to two canes then to a walker and finally to a wheelchair. My ability to speak clearly was affected. My mental processing speed slowed. I chased miracle drugs. Physical therapied myself to the wall, ran some prayers upstairs but never heard back. Despite it all, life was good. Both Terry and I had and still have an active life, good friends, three great sons and daughters-in-law, and six active grandchildren. I count myself lucky. Having been diagnosed later in life, I will probably avoid the more severe aspects of the disease like blindness and paralysis.

We play it one day at a time. Terry has the tougher role. She is by necessity the caregiver, housekeeper, bill payer, driver and cook. She is playing an active role in the raising of our latest grandchild. We worry about her own health. But while at times bemoaning lost opportunities, we are not in any way disconsolate and continue to do whatever we can to keep a healthy perspective and an active hand in the game. We have rented a rambling big house on the Rhode Island coast for a week this summer and the whole family will be there. We did the same thing in Tuscany a couple of years ago and we all still talk about it at our frequent family get-togethers.

Life, real life with all its rhythms, goes on.