He’d finished his talk, reciting the statistics, stressing the importance of research, telling his story.
The story of a husband losing the wife he once knew.
Then Brad Anderson began to recite a poem he’d written.
My love is spared the knowledge
Of her dance’s final steps
I must suffer the knowing
And the Devil calls the dance
“I got to the third stanza and I heard people sniffling,” says Brad, a volunteer ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Association in Nebraska. “It kind of jolted me.”
Every year, Brad gives more than two dozen talks for the Alzheimer’s group, many to encourage giving during United Way’s annual campaign.
People are also reading…
Since that day, he always ends his presentations with one of his poems.
On her wall,
the photos confuse her.
she does not know us
mysterious images of
people and places
from another world
The bewildered woman’s name is LuAnne. Now starring in a book of poetry and, like always, in her husband’s heart.
* * *
Brad and LuAnne met at Lincoln High and married when they were 19. They have a son and a daughter, a son-in-law and one grandson.
They spent their married life dancing, four nights a week, sometimes five, Irish ceili dances and American contra dances and Czech folk dances.
Brad is an analyst at Windstream; LuAnne’s last job was as business manager for the Department of Modern Languages at UNL.
She took a leave from work in the summer of 2010 after she began having trouble reading her email. The words alone made sense, but not the sentences.
And it wasn’t just deciphering written language. She started having trouble recognizing faces, too.
As the life she knew began to fade, LuAnne didn’t understand what was happening to her, why she couldn’t go back to her job, why she looked in the mirror puzzled by the vacant face that stared back.
She was 55. Her official diagnosis: Semantic Dementia.
Brad coped. He went to work early and took a two-hour lunch; he hired caretakers for the hours he couldn’t be there. He was clueless, he says now. But he joined support groups and he began writing his poems.
“It was a way to try to figure things out really,” he says. “Things there aren’t even words for.”
Two summers ago, after a series of manic episodes, LuAnne moved to a care facility in Omaha.
By last summer, Brad had written more than two dozen poems and read them to hundreds of people at United Way gatherings. He’d recited them at coffee shop poetry readings, he’d posted them on Facebook alongside photos of he and LuAnne -- both of them grinning.
He’d written them for himself, but the poems seemed to speak to others, too, and he started to think maybe they could have a greater purpose.
* * *
The books are tiny works of art.
Wildflower seeds pressed into the cream-colored covers -- handmade at Porridge Papers in Lincoln -- flyleaf paper that looks like the forest, each volume bound by hand and tied with linen thread.
Andrew Shaw and Mary Toscano designed and produced “Prairie Dance,” a pocket-sized field guide to Brad’s devotion to LuAnne.
Andrew is LuAnne’s nephew, and he and his wife, Mary, are artists in Salt Lake City. Andrew grew up here, watching his Aunt LuAnne and Uncle Brad dance, sharing LuAnne’s love of music.
Last September, Brad asked the couple if they could assemble a book of his poetry to donate to the Alzheimer’s Association’s annual gala.
Andrew and Mary didn’t hesitate. They’d admired Brad as a devoted caretaker and advocate for Alzheimer’s patients.
“I’m just really inspired by him and the way he’s handled LuAnne’s illness, and the amount of love he’s shown our family,” Andrew says.
They decided to create 25 books, each hand-numbered, so Brad would have enough to share.
The book should be small, they thought.
“It’s such an intimate experience reading the poems,” says Mary, who spent six years working at a small letterpress and bookbinding studio. “We were thinking it should be something they could hold close.”
And it is: 5 inches tall, and not quite 4 inches across, about the size of a postcard.
The book’s title -- letterpressed into the cover without using ink -- nearly blends into the wildflower paper, mimicking LuAnne’s fading memory.
Even the color and texture of the flyleaf paper -- an emerald green, veined with fiber -- was carefully chosen.
“Brad finds a lot of solace in visiting the prairie,” Andrew says. “We wanted a color that would reflect that prairie feel.”
I walk amidst her memory
Through the tallgrass and the dreams
I dream upon the hilltop
Of her spirit and her dance
* * *
When the books arrived from Salt Lake City, Brad placed each one in a small gold box lined with pale green tissue paper.
He typed a message: “The value of this book is the personal nature of its poetry and the care that went into producing each hand bound copy,” he wrote. “I felt it was important to share this with all of you.”
Then he sent them off. One to the Alzheimer’s Association for its auction. The rest to his two children and his brothers and LuAnne’s siblings and their nieces and nephews.
His daughter received her book last week, surprised by the package in the mail.
“It is so beautiful and unexpected,” Hannah Kahler said.
“It’s a beautiful book,” agreed Megan Myers at the Alzheimer’s Association. “I’d seen his poems before and heard him read his poems -- they just bring me to tears along with everyone who hears them.”
Brad is happy with the book, too. He’s proud of what Andrew and Mary created.
Brad drives to Omaha three or four times a week. He has supper with LuAnne. He pushes her wheelchair into the sun. She is happy to see him. He is happy to see her.
For the most part, she has just two words left: Oh and gosh. She always says them together. “But she says them all kinds of different ways.”
She can still play games on her iPad. Sometimes she puts her arm around his neck and pulls him in for a kiss.
“I love being with her,” LuAnne’s poet husband says. “I know that might sound kind of crazy, but it gives me joy.”
He puts himself in his wife’s world, following her lead the way he did when they danced.
I am with her
I visit to spend time in her presence
To be with the part of me I leave with her
As she looks and asks me, “Who are you?”