Popa had a sense

2012

I hoard jokes. Maybe, because comedy is all about somebody's pain and laughter is one way to not let the pain of living overload the joy of living.

While cleaning out my desk I happened to run across a blank copy of a gift certificate that granted the bearer a Death, assisted by Jack Kevorkian, MD.

The certificate started me thinking about my "Popa," Jarvis Jennings, Sr. His Death Certificate listed pneumonia as the official cause; the reality was Alzheimer’s Disease.

          Jarvis met his Jeanie with The Light Brown Hair during a visit to relatives in South Dakota. When he saw Jean Peterson wiping the runny nose of a small boy he decided at once she was the woman he wanted for his bride. Popa’s dark hair was salted gray from the time he hit 40. With affection, he frequently told her, “You don’t get gray hairs. You give them.” His genie took care of him through forty-two years of marriage.

          Towering six-feet-six-inches, Jarvis was too tall to fit into the cockpit of a World War II fighter plane even though he was able to get a doctor to fudge his height on Navy records. Because of his civilian flight experience as a crop duster, Jarvis became the Landing Signal Officer on the USS Guadalcanal where he earned the nickname “Stretch.” He bears the distinction of being the first man to land airplanes at night on an aircraft carrier during WWII. Jarvis was one of Cap'n Dan's (Rear Admiral Daniel V. Gallery 1901-1977) men when the flattop captured the U-505 German submarine that now rests in Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, Ill. Gallery wrote about his LSO in "Now Hear This" a humorous 1965 book about the Navy.

          After an honorable discharge in 1944, Jarvis gave flight lessons, dusted crops, and repaired automobiles. He and Jean raised two sons. They adopted the daughter of one of those sons in 1969. I was that child.

Sitting on wooden pews, not listening to the speaker at church drone on, I remember being fascinated by the size and mottled skin of my Popa's hands—tan with large patches of white. Like his mustache, he claimed his hands' appearance was due to having spilled too much DDT on them while keeping the boll weevil out of Arizona cotton fields.

          Alzheimer’s as it progresses is a decidedly unfunny disease for the afflicted person and their families. Nerve cells in the brain degenerate, memory deteriorates, the personality changes, and the caregivers’ days devolve from 24 hours to endless. In the early 1980s it wouldn’t have mattered if our kindly family doctor had known what Yale researchers determined in February 2009, that amyloid plaques in the brain are an Alzheimer's culprit. That knowledge would not have paid for the medications Jarvis would only take in liquid form. The knowledge wouldn't have helped us find him down busy city streets when he managed to escape the home he built with the front door facing away from the street so the Fuller Brush salesmen couldn't knock.

          When Jarvis was well, he did the bulk of the grocery shopping. As the disease progressed Jean necessarily took on supermarket duty, often with her husband in tow because he was a danger to himself when left alone. One day, a Far Side cartoon caught our eyes: A woman headed into a store left her husband in the car, pawing at the back window as a dog might. We had to laugh so we wouldn’t cry.

          My Popa was in his mid-seventies when I was a teenager. I watched helplessly as my heroic jack-of-all-trades forgot them all. I still wonder what, if any, spark of his personality and knowledge survived as he fell further into an incomprehensible abyss. The wit of a child was certainly easier to deal with than the terror when frustrated violence occasionally erupted. He once took an axe to the hood of a Bonneville Chevy he had fully restored.

          As a God-fearing man, would Jarvis have ever considered Kevorkian’s way out merciful or ethical? How much of his soul remained intact inside the prison of dementia? Was Jarvis horrifyingly aware in some corner of his brain that he could no longer build tricycles from scratch, hold his wife tenderly, play his harmonica, or write poetry? Brain mapping has yet to answer that question. In 1987, the day before he died, Jarvis clearly remembered his son for the first time in several years. He awoke in the Phoenix Veteran's Hospital and said, “Well hi, Bruce,” as though our lives were copasetic.

          Comedy is pain, love, and life. I know, because I hear my Popa chuckle a little whenever I bump into a table corner. While I’m still wincing, his deep bass voice blows clearly through the ether, “You’re just in too Goddamn big a hurry.”

          Jean donated Jarvis' brain to science although some members of her church gave her much grief for that decision.

          Meanwhile, little white mice in laboratories scurry on little feet as they hasten scientific understanding of Alzheimer's. One day, people like my Popa will not be trapped in a maze of gray matter.