By Laura McAlister
Journal Editor
When Ellen Marie Edmonds met her husband, the late Frank Edmonds, he was a CEO, not a soldier. Late in his life, though, she did get to meet the soldier as well as the teenager and child that her husband once was.
Frank suffered from vascular dementia, a disease similar to Alzheimer’s, the last two years of his life and succumbed to the disorder in 2005 at the age of 84. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
The advanced dementia was triggered by a head injury in a car accident. It was 2002, and Frank was a retired CEO for AT&T in Mississippi, civilian aide to the secretary of the Army, a World War II veteran and very involved with the Boy Scouts of America. He and Ellen lived in Inverness. At the time, Ellen said, he was confident — and maybe even a little cocky, she added with a smile.
However, in three short years Frank reverted back to a child, even an infant, she said.
“This man was a brilliant man,” Ellen said. “But people with dementia, it’s like they’re going backwards in their learning. I married him when he was a widower. We were together 16 years.
“I never knew the younger Frank, but I got to meet him, as well as the adolescent and even the infant in that last year.”
While Ellen was watching her husband’s mind grow smaller, she also was caring for her first grandchild, Brantley. Though the two were in very different stages of their lives, Ellen couldn’t help but notice the similarities in Frank and Brantley. It was this that helped her embrace and cope with her husband’s degenerative disorder and eventually led her to write a book to help others with friends and families members suffering from Alzheimer’s or other dementias.
In 2008, three years after her husband’s death, Ellen published “Embracing Dementia: A Call to Love.” The book describes her journey with Frank and how she learned to love not just the CEO she married but also the soldier, child and infant that he once was.
Ellen will talk about that journey Nov. 17 at the United for Life Foundation’s Hearts for Hope Alzheimer’s Fundraiser Dinner. In addition to raising funds for Alzheimer’s and dementia education and research, the event will also honor Frank.
“It’s so great that they’re honoring my sweet husband Frank,” Ellen said. “He would be so excited because he’ll be the center of attention. He loved that.”
Ellen said the message she would like to spread is that dementia can take over the mind, but it can’t take the heart.
That’s what she learned during the years before her husband died.
“The mind has a heart,” she said. “And the heart doesn’t get dementia. I learned that I just had to adjust my microscope to be with him.
“As his world became smaller and smaller, he just became my precious baby.”
It was her granddaughter Brantley who helped her learn how to care for her husband. Ellen said she noticed Frank would respond well to the way she spoke to her baby granddaughter.
And just as her daughter’s family prepared for a new baby before Brantley’s birth, Ellen said she realized she needed to prepare for Frank’s dementia.
“I tell people all the time that I wish we would respond to dementia like we do to an unplanned pregnancy,” she said. “It’s a call to sacrificial love. It’s a matter of accepting reality.
“If you had a baby coming, you would be prepared. I know it’s different. With a baby you’re always moving forward, and with dementia you’re going backward until the day their heart stops beating.”
Ellen cared for Frank in their home with the help of live-in nurses, though at one point he was at an assisted living home while she had the house restructured to meet his needs.
She said he did have lucid moments, and at those times, she was there with words of love and encouragement.
“One day I saw him just sobbing into his hands, and I asked him what was wrong,” she said. “He said, ‘Ellen, I’ve lost my wisdom.’ I told him he could have some of mine. He just laughed.”
Ellen said she never tried to test Frank or his memory.
“I just met him where he was at that time,” she said.
Frank spent most of the last year of his life in a hospice bed. In her book, she refers to it as the “rails of love,” because it was at the rails of the hospice bed where she would meet her husband daily. At this time he was completely bedridden and, Ellen said, an infant once again.
He died Dec. 21, 2005, the same day Ellen learned of a new life that would soon be entering hers. Her daughter was expecting a girl, Riley.
Now, as Ellen watches her grandchildren continue to grow, she said it’s confirmed all her beliefs about Frank’s disease. She hopes her book will help others caring for loved ones with similar afflictions as well as those suffering from dementias.
“I wanted to be a source of hope and security,” she said. “If that person has fear, we can replace it with hope. Never forget the people.
“Even if they have dementia, they have moments of knowing. We just have to see the flame is still alive inside that person and embrace them where they are.”
