March 19 was simply the worst day of my life.
July 21, 1984 was one of the best. That was the day Laurie and I married.
A few weeks after that, however, we had a pretty bad day. That’s when Laurie looked at me and said, “We need cats.”
Cats? No, no cats. I grew up in a household of dogs. We didn’t have cats. I’m not saying we hated cats, but they were like alien creatures. Some people have dogs. Some people have cats. We were dog people. I was a dog person.
“We’re not getting cats,” I said. I mean, I had known Laurie grew up with cats, and I forgave her for that. We had talked about many things in the run-up to our marriage – toilet seat up or down (answer: down), who cleans what (answer: hire a cleaner). But we had never talked about cats. We were not getting cats.
A few days later we were at a house in Georgetown – a section of Washington, DC – looking at a box filled with squirming little kittens. “Cute, “ I said, “but we’re not getting cats.”
A week later, we had two cats.
We called one Mike – full-name, Mikhail Gorbachev, so I guess you can tell that at least I got to name one of the cats. The other one Laurie named Pittywitz – an old Farrell family cat name or, as we called her, Pudding.
Many, many years later, Pudding got diabetes, so twice a day, every day, for several years, I would be the one injecting her with insulin so she might stay alive.
Marriage, I guess, is like that.
Many years after we first got the cats, we also got a dog and we became a household with cats and a dog. The divide between dog people and cat people was no more.
Marriage can be like that too.
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There are so many things to remember about a person, so many things to miss.
I miss our nicknames. When we first started dating, Laurie simply referred to me as “Boston.” Not “Tom.” Just “Boston.” She was living in DC, I was here in the Back Bay. She’d call on the phone. “Hey, Boston, how ya doing?” she’d ask.
Later, we began to call each other “PAL.” It was an acronym that stood for Person I Love. I know, you’d think the acronym should therefore be PIL but Laurie fancied herself a girl from the south and so we pronounced it, “Person Ah Love.” PAL.
I had another nickname for Laurie: IBW. It stood for “incredibly beautiful woman.” And she was: beautiful, sexy, loving. She was way out of my league but for some reason she dated me and married me.
I miss that Laurie.
I miss Laurie’s obsession with salted sunflower seeds. She would have a bag next to her as she’d read or watch TV, cracking them between her teeth and depositing the shells in a close-by bowl. And she was fussy about them. “David’s” was her preferred brand; “Planters” was OK too. Others, she wouldn’t touch. Once, trying to broaden her horizons, I got her an assortment of flavored seeds – BBQ, ranch, sweet & spicy. She wouldn’t touch them. Salted only, thank you.
I miss her love of growing things. Not only pansies, the spring flower that gave her enormous delight with its wild variety of colors. But she also loved to grow herbs of all sorts – basil, thyme, rosemary. Here’s the problem though. She grew them on our deck in the city which backed onto an alley through which passed all manner of traffic, from cars to garbage trucks. It was not, shall we say, the most sanitary of places. So sometimes if she wasn’t paying attention, I took the cuttings she offered but substituted the same herbs from the local Star Market.
I miss her love of family. When her father, Hal, suffered an aneurysm while living in Las Vegas, she dropped everything and flew to his side, eventually bringing him back to Boston to live out his final years.
I miss her love of theater. She acted in plays while in high school and college. As Lauren mentioned, she encouraged her and Bryn to pursue theater as well. Laurie joined the board of the Boston Children’s Theater and – more importantly – showed up for almost every show, eager to support her children on stage. At one point, Laurie too got back on-stage, taking a leading role in a comedy called “Noises Off.” We returned the favor, going to watch her even though, somewhat unkindly, we behind her back called it “Noises Awful.”
I miss her strong and certain will. Laurie was a feminist. As we were thinking about marriage, she told me in no uncertain terms that she intended to keep her own name. And when we had children, that name also became their last name. And she raised those children as feminists too – not in any overtly political sort of way, but rather by simply teaching them to be their own people, independent and free-thinking.
I miss her amazing laugh, her easy outgoing attitude, and her prodigious memory for new names and new faces. I would hold fundraisers and I’d have her by my side, a human contacts app, telling me the names of the people coming in.
I miss how much she cared for people and empathized with them. I especially miss her deep devotion to our children. She passed her finest qualities on to them.
Judy Witthohn, a friend of ours from our first few years in DC is with us today from Denver. She wrote me these words of remembrance right after Laurie died: “Laurie captivated a room without even knowing it,” Judy wrote. “Decisive, smart, self-assured, she knew what she wanted and what she did not.”
Yep, that was Laurie. And I miss her.
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Alzheimer’s is a strange disease. It proceeds slowly, almost invisibly, on its destructive course. It’s a bit like the transition from summer to fall. The green leaves change to red or yellow or orange, but we never actually see them change. It’s just that, one day they’re green and suddenly, they’re not.
So too Alzheimer’s. It officially begins with a diagnosis: primary progressive aphasia of the logopenic variation. Then there comes a day when the person you love can no longer hold a conversation. Sometime later, you realize she doesn’t know how to turn channels on a TV. Sometime after that, pen and paper become foreign objects. One day you visit and she looks at you without knowing who you are.
Leaves turn color over a brief period of time. But Alzheimer’s takes years. Laurie was diagnosed seven years ago, but looking back, we know it affected her well before then. She was, in a sense, not herself for a third of our marriage, for more than a third of Lauren and Bryn’s lives. And that amount of time, those long, long years, sometimes makes it hard to remember the days when the leaves were green, hard to remember the woman we all knew.
So, thank you, Tim, Patty, Marcia, Gill, Pamela, Lauren, and Bryn – thank you for helping us to remember the leaves of green. Thanks to Old South Church, senior minister Nancy Taylor, and minister of music Mitch Crawford for giving us space to be together. Thanks to Kate Keane for what will be – soon – her beautiful singing. And thanks to all of you, gathered here. Thank you for your memories, thank you for your stories, thank you for your support.
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Even in the midst of Laurie’s disease, even as we were losing the person we loved, some essence remained. Serena Heartz is here today. Her father Ed passed away just a few months ago while at Hebrew Senior Life. “I wish that I knew Laurie back when,” she wrote me, “but I will remember her dancing in the hallway, popping into my father's room for a surprise visit, and radiating happiness.”
Yep, that was Laurie. Radiating happiness. I miss her happiness.
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Here’s another thing about Alzheimer’s. Because it happens so slowly, because it happens so gradually, there never seems to be a right time to say goodbye. I mean, one day you could have this big, emotional, heart-wrenching moment, and then the next day you wake up and go, “Oh, you’re still here.”
And then, when the person really is lost to you, you realize the time for goodbyes is lost as well.
So, let us say goodbye.
Goodbye, Laurie. I wish you were here to experience so many millions of marvelous moments. I wish you were here to see the extraordinary adults your children have become. I wish this disease had never happened to you. I wish this disease had never happened to us. But, to quote a wise, old sage, “So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for us to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” After the service, by the way, feel free to ask Lauren and Bryn who that wise old sage was. They know.
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
That’s our challenge. We could mourn and hide away, I guess, lost in grief, but I hope not. Rather, let us love, care, work, dance and sing. I’m not going to urge on you the cliché, “Live every day as if it’s your last” because I really don’t think it makes any sense. I mean, if we really lived every day as if it’s the last, we’d never, say, save any money. We’d never show up at our jobs.
But I do urge this: Give each day your fullest measure of joy, purpose, ambition and thought. Radiate happiness. In that way, we honor, remember and are Laurie Farrell: daughter, wife, mother, sister, friend.
Thank you.
Delivered at Laurie's Memorial Service at Old South Church on April 6, 2019