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The Winner of Our Senior Essay Contest: A Love Song for Deborah Michael Tobin

Published

7 months ago

December 27, 2023

(Erin Otwell / The Free Press)

Over 400 readers entered our second-ever Free Press Essay contest, where we asked those over 70 to tell us about a pivotal time in their life—and the wisdom they gleaned from it. We received essays from 47 states and 10 countries, including from writers in Italy, South Africa, and China. We were blown away.

It took many weeks, and more than a few editors debating late into the night, to whittle down the pile.

Yesterday, you heard from our runners-up: Cheri Block Sabraw, 73, wrote movingly about learning the virtue of patience; Jonathan Rosenberg, 72, reflected on his five marriages over as many decades; and Joan McCaul, 74, described learning how to appreciate nature from her young son.

Today, we bring you our winner: Michael Tobin, 77, who writes from Israel.

Michael is a psychologist. He is also the proud father of four and grandfather of eighteen. But the subject of his essay is his wife, Deborah.

We asked Michael to read his essay along with Ruby LaRocca, the winner of our teen contest earlier this year, for a special episode of Honestly. To listen to their stories of teenage happiness and senior wisdom from two people 60 years apart, click below:

If life were fair, Alzheimer’s should never have eaten Deborah’s brain.

My wife had no family history of the disease. All four of her Lebanese grandparents lived far into their nineties and were as acerbic, argumentative, and quick-witted at ninety-five as they were at twenty-five.

But Alzheimer’s devoured my wife, my best friend, my soul mate. Gone is the compassionate psychologist who graduated from Wellesley, MIT, and the Sorbonne. The polymath fluent in five languages who could calculate complex mathematical formulas in her head and whose brain came with its own GPS. The woman whose body could contort into pretzel-like yoga postures with the ease and grace of a ballerina. The truth-seeker who had an uncanny ability to pierce through layers of psychic sludge to unearth a soul in all its shining glory.

Diagnosed in November 2018, she had won a very perverse lottery.

Our wake-up call came one month earlier, on a late morning in our favorite café. I was sitting with Deborah, three of our four children, their spouses, and seven of our thirteen grandchildren when an old friend, Hannah, approached the table. She asked Deborah and me about our recent trek to Everest Base Camp.

I answered with a few words like freezing, tough, amazing.

Deborah said nothing. I noticed a faraway look in her eyes.

When Hannah left, I asked Deborah if she was okay.

“Who was that woman?” she replied.

It was a terrifying question when asked about Hannah, a woman she had known for thirty-two years—a woman with whom she vacationed and shared an office.

Until then, I hadn’t wanted to see the obvious.

For the previous year, Deborah had been uncharacteristically agreeable and far too mellow. I began to long for her confrontations—those moments when she’d stare me down with her intense green eyes and awaken me with some unpleasant truth about myself.

Two years earlier, she caught me sucking in my stomach. Matter-of-factly she said, “Who are you kidding, Michael? You’re fat.” No sweet equivocations. Just straight to the point.

I was furious. Two months later, I was fifteen pounds lighter.

Then there was the binge-watching. When I would ask, “Why so much TV?” her answer was invariably, “I need to relax.”

This was not my Deborah. My Deborah relaxed by creating videos, fixing broken electrical appliances, trekking to high places, meditating, performing one hundred and eight salutations to the sun.

And soon after, her rich, descriptive vocabulary slowly ebbed away.

Two years earlier, she had given a presentation to five hundred psychologists, demonstrating how to transform the language of passivity and hopelessness into the active words of therapeutic change.

Now, a complex situation filled with multiple variables—an act of terror, an overdue bill, a broken marriage—became, in her words, “A mess.” I cringed the moment the word slipped from her lips.

And, of course, there was her memory. In the months leading up to that October morning, she had mixed up our grandchildren’s names. And what should have been the most startling wake-up call of all: she watched movies she’d seen as recently as the previous day, convinced that she had never seen them before.

The first stage of grief is denial.

I was no stranger to Alzheimer’s. From 1982 to 1985, I had worked as a psychologist on the geriatric ward of Boston’s Hahnemann Hospital where I watched, helplessly, as this insidious disease ravaged beautiful minds.

But when Deborah was diagnosed, neither my heart nor my mind could make space for this harsh reality. One that would eventually disrupt the remaining years of our life together.

When the neurologist turned to her and said, “I’m sorry, you have Alzheimer’s,” she nodded dispassionately as if she’d known for weeks. In a process that takes months—if not years—she had skipped the first four of Kübler-Ross’s stages and gone straight to acceptance. “It is what it is,” she said, looking directly into my eyes. “We’ll deal with it like we’ve dealt with everything else.”

“No!” I said loudly. “We’re not giving in to this fucking disease.”

I was seventy-two years old at the time. Deborah was sixty-nine. Forty-four years earlier we had collided on a dance floor. Back then, for some crazy reason I still don’t understand, I glared at the raven-haired beauty who bumped into me and then gave her the finger.

She stared back, fearlessly. Then a smile broke across her lips. “You have a strange way of picking up a girl.”

We laughed. It wasn’t your typical introduction. But nothing was typical about our relationship. That night we danced with each other as if we had always known the other’s moves.

There was simply too much at stake for me to give in to Alzheimer’s or to give up on Deborah.

As a psychologist, I’m a professional problem solver. I search for answers, for elusive solutions, for the anomaly at the tail end of a bell curve.

It turns out that anomalies reside in every corner of the internet. I read about a man who couldn’t remember any of his grandchildren and then after six days of downing a turmeric, apple cider vinegar, and lemon juice cocktail, he counted backward—flawlessly—by sevens from 100 to 2. He then called all six of his grandchildren by their correct names.

So, we tried all that: cocktails to jog her memory, herbs to rejuvenate neurons, supplements for igniting synapses, a low-carb diet to make the sticky white stuff suffocating her brain dissolve, exercises to resuscitate the hippocampus. All the while, Deborah watched the same movie day after day as if it were the first time.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it’s complex,” she answered.

“The Hangover is complex?”

“Yeah, they can’t find that guy.”

“What guy?” I asked.

“You know, that guy,” she answered.

Nothing worked. Deborah’s Alzheimer’s didn’t bow before the internet’s ambitious promise to eliminate the disease through intermittent fasting, macadamia nuts, salmon, and kale. No amount of omega-3 or lion’s mane could stop its relentless death march. Like the creeping flow of lava, the deadly white amyloid plaques, neurofibrillary tangles, and uncontrolled surge of glial cells powered through the cracks and the crevices destroying Deborah’s lovely walnut-shaped cerebral cortex where her memory and identity once resided.

Prudence said we should continue with donepezil, a drug that stimulates a neurotransmitter associated with the storage and retrieval of memory. It helped—minimally—she still remembered to call me Michael, but all thirteen grandchildren became a cacophony of nameless and faceless noise machines babbling in Hebrew, a language she once spoke well but now dribbled from her mouth as an amalgam of pidgin French, Swedish, and English.

Walks helped. In fact, walking is the only scientifically proven method to slow down—not stop or eliminate, merely prolong—the progression of the illness.

It is said that rage is the last act of the incompetent—a powerfully empty emotion that feeds on helplessness and despair. I was sinking into it. I wanted to scream, hit, or break something or someone. But who? But what? A heartless disease? The medical profession? My helplessness?

My friends were worried about me. One suggested I write, so I did. And what emerged surprised me.

It was a hint of a story—far more one of healing than of giving voice to the dark side of fury and hopelessness. In my mind, I composed a love song to Deborah.

That love song became a book titled Riding the Edge: A Love Song to Deborah. It is a testimonial to the most extraordinary person I’ve known and a memoir about our not-quite around-the-world bicycle odyssey that took place over a six-month period in 1980.

After I completed each chapter, I read it out loud to Deborah. I followed her eyes, her expressions, her gestures, anything that would indicate that she was present with the story.

In Paris, we had a serendipitous encounter with a Dutch Jew who told his tale of tragedy and loss in the Nazi death camps. Tears flowed down her cheeks as I read to her the story of his fifty family members who died in Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor.

When I read sections recalling our struggles pedaling up the Alps then our delights soaring down, I sensed an imperceptible movement in her leg, almost like she was shaking loose an old memory.

We held hands in the safety of our living room as I read the chapter about how Mahmoud drove like a lunatic through the bombs and bullets of Beirut.

“Can you believe we actually did this?” she exclaimed.

“Do you remember why we went to Lebanon?” I asked. I could see from the movement of her eyes that she was searching for an answer.

“Should I help?” I asked.

“No,” she answered. A minute passed, then her eyes widened and she said, “Because I had family there.”

“Yes, because you had family there.”

It’s now been more than five years since our wake-up call. Deborah’s past has slipped from consciousness. Her future is no longer hers to shape, but together we still own the present. I know it from her eyes; I can see it when she smiles; I can feel it when she reaches for my hand and says, “I love you.”

I’m no longer in denial. I don’t rage against the unfairness of it all. Grief hasn’t crippled me. I search for love and connection in small ways because a moment of connection is to be alive.

And to be alive with Deborah—with Alzheimer’s—is to arrive at the tail end of the curve.

Michael Tobin, 77, is a psychologist and writer living in Israel.

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July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

11 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Substacks

TGIF: The Week Unburdened by the Week That Has Been Suzy Weiss

Published

18 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Pro-Palestinian protesters gather outside of Union Station to protest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States. (Probal Rashid via Getty Images)

Oh, no, it’s the sister again, for another slow news week. Let’s get to it.

→ Biden dropped out: Six years ago emotionally, but technically this past Sunday, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. He did it via X and promptly threw his support (and cash) behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Then he got Covid and hunkered down in Delaware—or depending on what hooch you’ve been drinking, died and was reanimated so he could appear before the cameras on Wednesday to address the nation. Joe’s family, including Hunter, sat along the wall of the Oval Office as he spoke. The president talked about the cancer moonshot, ending the war in Gaza, putting the party over himself, and Kamala’s tenacity, as Kamala’s pistol dug ever-so-slightly harder into his back. Right after, Jill, the First Lady of passive aggression, who apparently wanted to outdo her heart emoji, tweeted a handwritten note “to those who never wavered, to those who refused to doubt, to those who always believed.” I respect a First Lady who stands by her man and her energetic stepson. A First Lady who sees the high road way up there and says to herself, “If they want us out of here so bad, they can clean out the fridge and strip the beds themselves!”

→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way—and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant—that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.

That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened but what has been”—as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.

And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.

Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool.”

→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk Boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-11. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe. . . well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story.” The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.

Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the Boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.

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July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

22 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Momentum continues to build behind Vice President Kamala Harris to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, and the national narrative as a whole has shifted.

Democrats appear to be generating significant enthusiasm among younger Americans. Yesterday, for the first time in their history, the March for Our Lives organization endorsed a presidential candidate: Kamala Harris. Students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, organized March for Our Lives after the shooting there in 2018. Executive director Natalie Fall said that the organization “will work to mobilize young people across the country to support Vice President Harris and other down-ballot candidates, with a particular focus on the states and races where we can make up the margin of victory—in Arizona, New York, Michigan, and Florida.”

Andrea Hailey of Vote.org announced that in the 48 hours after President Biden said he would not accept the Democratic nomination, nearly 40,000 people registered to vote. That meant a daily increase in new registrations of almost 700%.

People are turning out for Harris in impressive numbers. In the hours after she launched her campaign, Win With Black Women rallied 44,000 Black women on Zoom and raised $1.6 million. On Monday, around 20,000 Black men rallied to raise $1.2 million. Tonight, challenged to “answer the call,” 164,000 white women joined an event that “broke Zoom” and raised more than $2 million and tens of thousands of new volunteers.

Another significant endorsement for Harris came yesterday from Geoff Duncan, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, who wrote on social media: “I’m committed to beating Donald Trump. The only vehicle left for me to do that with is the Democratic Party. If that requires me to vote for, speak for, or endorse [Kamala Harris] then count me in!” Duncan’s public announcement offers permission for other Georgia Republicans to make a similar shift. In 1964, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond similarly paved the way for southern Democrats to vote for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

Harris’s appearances are generating such enthusiasm from audiences that when she delivered the keynote address this morning at the convention of the American Federation of Teachers in Houston, Texas, the applause delayed her ability to begin. After a speech defending education and calling out the cuts to it in Project 2025, Harris ended by demonstrating that after decades of Democrats being accused of being anti-American, Trump’s denigration of the country has enabled the party to claim the position of being America’s defenders.

“When we vote, we make our voices heard,” Harris said. “So today, I ask you, AFT, are you ready to make your voices heard? Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? And when we fight, we win! God bless you and God bless the United States of America.”

Today the Commerce Department reported that economic growth in the second quarter was higher than expected, coming in at 2.8%, thanks to higher spending driven by higher wages. The country’s changing momentum is showing in media stories hyping the booming economy Biden’s team tried for years to get traction on. “Full Employment is Joe Biden’s True Legacy” was the title of a story by Zachary Carter that appeared yesterday in Slate; CNN responded to today’s good economic news with an article by Bryan Mena titled: “The US economy is pulling off something historic.”

With Harris appearing to have sewn up the nomination, the question has turned to her vice presidential pick. That question is fueling the sense of excitement as potential choices are in front of cameras and on social media advocating Democratic positions and defending the United States from Trump’s denigration. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro listed the economic gains of the past years, and said: “Trump, you’ve got to stop sh*t talking America. We’ve got to start standing tall and being patriotic and showing how much we love this amazing nation.”

The vice presidential hopefuls appear to be having some fun with showcasing their personalities, as Minnesota governor Tim Walz did in his video from the Minnesota State Fair where he and his daughter went on an extreme ride. So are social media users who have dug up old videos of, for example, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg explaining how he would pilot a small starfighter that had lost its auxiliary shields, or Arizona senator Mark Kelly’s identical twin brother Scott pranking a fellow astronaut on the Space Station with a gorilla suit Mark smuggled on board.

That sense of fun is an enormous relief after years of political weight, and it has spilled over into making fun of the Republican ticket, most notably with a false story that vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance wrote about—and I cannot believe I am typing this—having sex with a couch. The story is stupid, but worse are the denials of it, which have spread the story into populations that otherwise would likely not have seen it.

Just two weeks ago, Vance appeared to be the leader of the next generation of extremist MAGA Republicans, but now that calculation seems to have been hasty. Vance is a staunch opponent of abortion—the key issue in 2024—and he has been vocal in his disdain of women who have not given birth, saying in 2021, for example, that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to say that people who don’t have children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country.

Republican commentator Meghan McCain noted that Vance’s “comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends. These comments have caused real pain and are just innately unchristian.” Actor Jennifer Aniston, who tends to stay out of politics, posted: “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States.” Vance had called out Harris by name in those 2021 comments, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife Kerstin Emhoff took to social media to defend Harris from Vance’s attacks on her as “childless,” calling her “a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.” Harris’s stepdaughter chimed in: “I love my three parents.”

Vance also ties the Republican ticket firmly to Project 2025. The Trump camp has worked to distance itself from Project 2025—not convincingly, since the two are obviously closely tied, but it turns out that Vance wrote the introduction for a forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who was the lead author of Project 2025. The book appears to popularize that plan, right down to its endorsement of a “Second American Revolution,” and according to the book deal report, proceeds from the book will go to the Heritage Foundation “and aligned nonprofits.”

Now Vance’s words praising Project 2025 will be in print, just in time for the election. Yesterday, Trump posted: “I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25 [sic]. The fact that I do is merely disinformation put out by the Radical Left Democrat Thugs. Do not believe them!”

Trump is clearly aware of, and concerned about, the changing narrative. This morning, he called in to Fox & Friends, saying, “We don’t need the votes. I have so many votes. I’m in Florida now…and every house has a Trump-Vance sign on it. Every single house…. It’s amazing the spirit…. This election has more spirit than I’ve ever seen ever before.” Tonight the Trump campaign proved their worry by backing out of debates with Harris, saying debates can’t be scheduled until she is the official nominee, although Biden was not the official nominee when they met in June.

The larger narrative shift has affected the media approach to Trump, who is accustomed to shaping perceptions as he wishes. Now, 12 days after the mass shooting at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, there is increasing media attention to the fact that there has still been no medical report on Trump’s injuries, although he wore a large bandage on his ear at the Republican National Convention and said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday that he “took a bullet for democracy.”

Yesterday, FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress that it is not clear whether Trump was “grazed” by a bullet or by shrapnel, words that former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance called “FBI speak for, ‘it’s unlikely it was a bullet.’”

CNN chief medical consultant Dr. Sanjay Gupta noted last week that the people need a real medical evaluation of Trump’s injuries, explaining that “gunshot blasts near the head can cause injuries that aren’t immediately noticeable, such as bleeding in or on the brain, damage to the inner ear or even psychological trauma.” But, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has noted, much of the press has kept mum about the story.

Media outlets have reported Wray’s testimony, though, and in a social media post today, Trump called on Wray, whom he appointed to head the FBI, to resign from his post for “LYING TO CONGRESS.” Tonight, he reiterated that “it was…a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard.”

Perhaps eager to get back to their districts, House Republicans canceled their expected votes on appropriations bills scheduled for next week and left town today for their August recess. The House will not reconvene until early September. The government’s fiscal year 2025 begins on October 1.

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/opinion/trump-lies-charts-data.html

https://marchforourlives.org/in-a-first-ever-endorsement-march-for-our-lives-endorses-kamala-harris-for-president/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-economic-growth-regains-steam-second-quarter-inflation-slows-2024-07-25/

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/biden-economy-employment-inflation.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/entertainment/jennifer-aniston-jd-vance/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/economy/us-economy-gdp-second-quarter/index.html

https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/jd-vance-wrote-foreword-book-project-2025-architect-kevin-roberts-and-proceeds

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-might-not-shot-1930037

https://people.com/was-trump-struck-by-bullet-or-shrapnel-fbi-director-testifies-8683340

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-wants-fbi-director-resign-immediately-chris-wray-rcna163641