Her Memory Is Gone, but His Love Remains

Every once in a while, 86-year-old Sue Williams looks in the mirror and is startled by the stranger staring back at her.

"Who is that?" she'll ask.

Chuck, her husband of 66 years, always gives the same answer.

"That's you, Susie," he says. "That's what you look like now."

Every time, Sue frowns in disbelief.

"She thinks she's in her 20s," he explains.

Chuck is sitting in a recliner in his living room as he recounts this story. Five days earlier, he was nearly killed in a tractor accident in their backyard.

His right arm is in a cast and in a sling. His left arm is bruised, and his ribs ache. He winces whenever he shifts in the chair.

His wife, sitting in the chair next to him, has made no mention of his injuries. She sits perfectly still, her steel-blue eyes fixed straight ahead.

"Come walk with me," she says to me softly. "Come walk with me to the farm."

Chuck laughs a little. "She'll be saying that a lot to you. She grew up on a farm. She used to milk five cows by hand every morning before she went to school."

He smiles at his wife, who does not notice him.

"Didn't you, Susie? You milked all those cows."

Sue doesn't respond.

"She's still a hottie," Chuck says, laughing again, but his smile fades. "She was always the prettiest little thing."

"I don't know what he's talking about," she says, still staring.

"Oh, Susie," he says. "Susie, Susie."

He dabs at his eyes and smiles.

"You see why I couldn't be stuck in a hospital," he says. "You see why I had to come home."

On Saturday afternoon, July 9, Chuck climbed onto his 1949 Ford 8N tractor to mow the 5 acres of rolling lawn behind their house.

He's done this every summer week for decades, hitching the tractor to 6-feet-wide blades for what is usually a two-hour job.

Chuck was almost finished, when he noticed a fallen limb in his path. He stepped down to move it.

It happened so quickly. One moment, he was kneeling down to lift the branch. The next, the tractor was rolling over him, pinning him to the ground.

In his 85 years, he never had known this kind of pain. His right arm and part of his narrow chest were trapped under one of the wheels. He grasped his cellphone with his left arm, but he couldn't see it to dial.

"I just kept hitting buttons," he says. "I was just hoping someone would answer the phone."

The first person he reached was his niece, Becky Frase.

"I could see the call was from Uncle Chuck, and I could hear something in the background, but I didn't know what it was," she says. "I called out his name, but there was no answer."

She turned to her husband. "Something's wrong," she said. "Uncle Chuck's not answering.'"

She redialed, and this time, Chuck answered.

"Get help!" he yelled. "Get help! I'm pinned under the tractor."

Becky called 911 and then called Chuck back to let him know help was on the way.

Becky called Chuck's daughter, Pam Payn, who was visiting her son, Jeremy, his wife, Cynthia, and their young son, Sean. They live 10 minutes away from Jeremy's grandparents.

Jeremy was standing barefoot in his kitchen when his mother answered the phone, and he started screaming.

"Grandpa's pinned under the tractor! Grandpa's pinned under the tractor!"

Pam ran to her car. Jeremy turned to his wife, who was about to leave for work.

"Watch Sean," he said. "Meet us over there."

Jeremy, still barefoot, ran to his Malibu and took off.

His grandfather is the only real father figure he ever has known.

"He taught me everything I know about how to be a man," he told me later.

Now his grandfather needed him.

Jeremy made the 10-minute drive in half the time, passing his mother's car along the way.

He drove across his grandparents' lawn and stopped a few feet from the tractor.

He noticed two things immediately: The tractor still was roaring, and Chuck was under it with his head between the wheels.

Jeremy shut off the tractor and darted over to his grandfather. The left wheel had come to a stop on Chuck's left shoulder and part of his chest. His right arm was raw and bloody.

Chuck looked up at his grandson and screamed, "Get it off me! Get it off me!"

"In my 32 years of life, I'd never seen my grandfather scared," Jeremy said later. "He was petrified."

Jeremy leaped onto the tractor and had to figure out fast how to get the wheel off his grandfather's chest.

"That was the tricky part," he says.

Jeremy carefully rolled the wheel off his grandfather and parked the tractor a few feet away. Then he dialed 911 as he raced back toward Chuck, who was on all fours struggling to get to his feet.

"Grandma's locked in the house!" Chuck yelled. "I've got to get in there!"

"Grandpa," Jeremy shouted. "Get back on the ground. We're getting you to the hospital."

Chuck was still on his knees, gasping for air and trying to stand.

"I don't need no help," he yelled. "I'm not going to any hospital. I can't leave your grandmother."

Jeremy could see that Chuck had no idea how seriously he was injured, so he did something he never had done before: The 6-footer threatened his grandfather.

"Grandpa, you've got 300 pounds of ugly here," he said. "You try getting up one more time, you're going to see uglier."

The ambulance soon pulled up, and Chuck Williams surrendered.

But only for a little while.

Paramedics rushed Chuck to a hospital, and he quickly was life-flighted to a trauma unit.

His arm was broken in two places. Doctors reset the bones.

One staff member after another tried to convince Chuck that he was staying overnight at the hospital for observation.

No way, Chuck said.

"I've got news for you," he told one of the nurses.

"I'll be walking down I-71 in a sling if I have to, but I'm not staying here."

He had to get home to Sue.

"She has her routine, see," he told them. "It changes from week to week, day to day maybe, but it's a routine, and I'm the only one who knows it."

Family members were staying with Sue while he was at the hospital, but he knew she was awake, and she'd be waiting for him to get home.

"I had to go through a 'road test,'" he tells me, grinning. "They told me I had to eat, drink, pee and walk."

He gobbled down a turkey sandwich. Then he drank two helpings of apple juice.

"OK," he said, "I've got to pee."

After that, he adjusted his hospital gown, turned to a male staffer — neither Chuck nor the hospital can figure out who it was — and said, "C'mon, we're going for a walk."

His daughter, Pam, describes what happened next.

"He was walking real slow, bent over and all," she says. "I saw him leave with the nurse next to him, but he didn't stop at the end of the hallway. He walked around the entire unit, and by the time he was approaching his room, he was walking ahead of the nurse."

Chuck passed his room and started to walk a second lap.

"We started to laugh," Pam says. "The nurse said, 'That's enough, Mr. Williams. You can go.'"

By midnight, Chuck was on the road home to his Susie.

Chuck is one of 15 million Americans who take care of someone with Alzheimer's disease, with no pay. In the five years since Sue's diagnosis, he's lost 45 pounds.

He shrugs off a question about his weight.

"Just been busy, I guess. Too busy to eat."

He was tough from a young age. His father died when he was still a child. At 17, he persuaded his mother to give the necessary permission for him to enlist in the Navy.

Like so many World War II veterans, he doesn't want to talk about his time in the Pacific.

When asked how his service changed him, he tears up.

"It makes you old real fast," he said. End of discussion.

He met Sue when he was 16. For him, it was pretty much love at first sight, but he had to win her over.

"For one thing, I had to start going to church," Chuck says. "She was a strict Baptist."

They were married Aug. 10, 1945.

Sue was only 5 feet 2 inches tall but as strong as they come and fierce for family.

Jeremy tells stories of his grandmother's cutting grass on a riding mower. She taught him how to golf, too, and would camp out in the woods with his friends and cousins when they were teenagers.

"Grandma used to be down for anything," he says.

Rachel Overcash has been friends with Sue since 1971.

"Susie was — Susie is, not was, is — a really strong-willed woman. And she's still Susie."

Rachel, who is 73, still remembers the day several years ago when she first realized Sue's memory was evaporating. They were leaving a restaurant where they had breakfast once a week.

In the parking lot, Sue became confused.

"Rachel, where's our car?'"

Rachel pointed. "Right here, Susie."

"Well, I hope you know the way home," Sue said. "Because I don't."

"Makes you ill in your stomach," Rachel says. "It's awful the first time you know it's Alzheimer's."

At the time, Rachel didn't share the story with Chuck or their children, Pam and David.

"I didn't want to say anything to the family," she says. "I knew they didn't want to believe it yet, and it wasn't for me to do that."

Chuck readily admits that he tried as hard as he could to ignore what was happening to his wife.

"Well, we didn't want to believe it," he says, looking at his daughter, who is sitting on the sofa.

"No," she says, shaking her head, "we sure didn't."

"Looking back, you can see it more clearly," Chuck says. "You can see when it started, when it was clear something was wrong."

It was Pam's daughter, Heather, a nursing student at the time, who put a name to the symptoms. She nudged her grandfather to get Grandma Sue tested.

After Sue's diagnosis, Chuck went to a meeting of an Alzheimer's support group.

His daughter had warned the group leader that her father was still in denial about Sue's illness. After he arrived, the woman pulled him aside, and they talked for an hour and a half.

"She laid it out for me," he said. "She made it clear it was only going to get worse and that we had to be prepared."

Chuck is now Sue's primary caregiver.

"I wouldn't have it any other way," he says. "I'm just glad it's me taking care of her. I couldn't imagine it the other way around. How awful would that be for her?"

Two attempts at respite care were disastrous.

"She ripped the cabinet doors off the hinges at one place," he says. "She thought her parents were in the cupboards. They had to call 911. It took four people to hold her down."

He wipes at his eyes, takes a deep breath.

"I realized I had to get her home."

Pam and other relatives help Chuck care for Susie. One day a week, a young home health aide, Stacie Papenhausen, visits for three hours. She came every day last week, but only because of Chuck's accident.

Rachel Overcash still pulls into the driveway every Thursday morning and takes Sue to breakfast.

Afterward they take a nap together. Sometimes when Sue wakes up, she props her head on one elbow and stares at Rachel.

"Who are you?" she'll ask.

No matter, Rachel says.

"I like being with her. I love Susie. I know it's different, but she is still my friend."

After Chuck's accident, Jeremy took the tractor for repairs.

"My grandfather was a hot mess that day," he says. "It was tough seeing him — the unbreakable, the leader of our family — on the ground like that.

"I'll be mowing the lawn from now on."

He says he continues to learn from his grandfather.

"I don't think my grandparents have ever spent a night away from each other in their 66 years of marriage. When he was insisting he would not stay in that hospital, I knew he would make it home that night.

"It's a reminder for me of how a marriage works."

During our interview, it was clear Chuck didn't know Jeremy's plans for that tractor.

"I just need a little time to heal," he says. "I'm almost ready to start mowing again. Isn't that right, Susie?"

Sue sits perfectly still.

"Let's go to the farm," she says. "I'm walking with her."

Chuck shakes his head when asked whether he still sees glimpses of the girl he married in the wife who now mistakes him for her father.

"No," he says. "No, that Sue is gone. This is who she is now."

He looks over at her and smiles.

"That's enough," he says. "That's enough for me."

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and an essayist for Parade magazine. To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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