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 An Alzheimer s Widow: Fabiola Trejo never thought she would be alone in her old age. But her husband Robert has fallen victim to Alzheimer s, dramatically changing their life together. 
View an Audio Slideshow of Fabiola Trejo |
THE NEWSPAPER LIES on the driveway where it was delivered hours earlier, already fading to yellow in the relentless summer sun.
Fabiola Trejo steps through the squeaking screen door of her modest Newark home and stoops to retrieve it. Her husband, Robert, stands feet away on the top step. His eyes are bright. His arms look ready to help. He is there. But then again, he is not. Lost in the throes of dementia, Robert Trejo, 82, is well down the path paved by Alzheimer's disease.
Fabiola's gaze shifts from the newspaper in her hand to her husband.
"Oh, he forgot to get the paper," Fabiola ends up saying to no one.
When Robert Trejo first began to show signs of dementia, he and his wife attributed it to old age. A misplaced set of keys, a gardening spade, a billfold. Senior moments, all of them.
But then Robert took a turn.
Literally. On a routine trip to their daughter's home in neighboring Fremont three years ago, Robert made a right turn he needed to make but did it from the middle lane of a busy roadway. Fabiola stifled a small scream as the car in the next lane screeched to a halt. Another split second and the car would have slammed into the passenger door. And Fabiola.
Robert drove on, completing the turn, oblivious.
"I said, 'Daddy, you see that corner over there? You better stop there.' He didn't argue," says Fabiola, 76. "When I got home, I said, 'You know what? Something's wrong with Dad. He never had an accident in all the years he drove. Something's wrong.'"
Six months passed before Robert got around to going to the doctor. After failing memory test after memory test, the doctor asked Fabiola if Robert had been taking his vitamin B12.
"I said no, you know, I'm a good cook. I cook nutritious meals," says Fabiola. "But they tested him and he didn't even have half a point of B12. That's what regulates the brain."
Robert's doctor prescribed a strict regimen of vitamin B12, B6 and folic acid. But that basically amounted to a stopgap for a disease whose greatest risk factor is simply increasing age. Because of the turning pages of a calendar and a predisposition in his genetic makeup, Robert's mind was deteriorating. The diagnosis was early Alzheimer's.
Far from the normal process of aging, Alzheimer's is a disorder of the brain's cells. It impairs memory. Thinking. Behavior. About 4.5 million Americans suffer from it. Ultimately, it leads to death.
"I think I could handle it if my husband had a heart attack. Or cancer. Then he'd still have his mind," says Fabiola. "But Alzheimer's is a dreaded disease. You lose communication. It just gets worse and worse. This kind of quiet disease is worse. Both of my parents died of cancer. But at least I could talk to them up until the last minute."
Fabiola says all of this as if her husband, who's sitting near her on the living room couch and staring at a blank television screen, weren't there.
She sighs.
"I'm very lonely here," she says.
A picture from Robert and Fabiola's wedding day, Nov. 10, 1945, hangs on a wall high above the dining room table. How the two met used to be a story they liked to tell together. Now Fabiola tells it alone.
It was only a few months earlier that year, she says, when Robert walked into her family's meat market and grocery store on Chicago's North Side. Robert was 22 and in town from New York, visiting one of his six brothers who grew up with him in Mexico City. Fabiola Kujawski was 16 — "16 and a half," she says — helping out her parents, both of whom were born in Poland, by working the cash register.
Robert asked for olive oil and Fabiola gave him vegetable. Robert came back for the right oil a few hours later and continued coming back for the next five days in a row, buying an ice cream cone as an excuse to talk to Fabiola.
"'Doesn't that boy ever buy anything other than a nickel ice cream?' is what my father said," says Fabiola. "It was a big deal."
On the sixth day, Robert asked Fabiola's mother for permission to take Fabiola out from behind the counter and for a walk in the park. That was in spring. In October, Robert proposed.
"I was a young bride. Everybody said it wouldn't work," says Fabiola. "It just so happens it'll be 60 years this November. It's so sad though. He doesn't know anymore. He doesn't know what day it is."
In the background Robert makes a kissing noise. The timing would seem perfect, given the mental trip his wife just took down memory lane — through Chicago's McKinley Park, the site of their first walk.
But she's taken it alone. Robert's kisses are for their dog, Teddy. Kissing the air and patting his hand on the settee, Robert beckons to the bichon frise, poodle and King Charles spaniel mix.
"There are days I get stressed out, frustrated," says Fabiola. "I cry. What can you do?"
Fabiola has to do everything. That's what happens when a live-in nurse is too expensive, her only daughter works full-time in Stanford's hematology department and her only son lives thousands of miles away in Healy, Alaska.
So in the morning, Fabiola lays out Robert's clothes. She walks him to the bathroom. She helps him shower. She helps him dress. When Robert isn't looking, she rushes the dirty clothes off to the hamper. Otherwise, Robert would put those on, too.
At breakfast, all the food has to be laid out. Even if they're just having oatmeal sprinkled with flaxseed, their usual. Robert wouldn't know how to eat it if it weren't put together in front of him.
The rest of the morning is busywork. Maybe some chores inside the house they've lived in since 1960. Maybe some tasks in the backyard garden. Though Robert hasn't yet strayed from the house, as many with dementia are prone to do, Fabiola puts an identification note with names and numbers on it inside a change purse and hangs it around his neck. She would have put it in his wallet, but he lost it.
"And he keeps taking the note to read it," says Fabiola. "And he loses it."
Alzheimer's patients typically live eight to 20 years after their diagnosis. More than seven out of 10 live at home. As sole caregiver, though, Fabiola struggles. Should the day come that Robert becomes unable to control his own bodily functions, she imagines she'll have to sell her home, move in with her daughter and put her husband in a home.
"Honey, it's very hard," she says. "I'm getting older, too."
Even harder for Fabiola is recognizing the shell that is her husband. It is difficult for her to reconcile it with her memory of the full Robert. The Robert that moved with her, permanently, to the East Bay in 1951, when their daughter Linda was 2. The Robert that fathered their son Robert Anthony, who's now an engineer staking his own claim in Alaska. The Robert who worked for years at Oakland's Sunshine Biscuits before getting a welding degree and eventually retiring in 1985 as a welder with Peterbilt Motors.
Sometimes Fabiola will take out an old picture album and point to a faded picture of Linda as a child, a picture of Robert Anthony as a toddler. She'll say how precious they were. Robert will nod and say, "Oh, yes," but Fabiola doesn't know if he remembers are not.
"All I have left is memories," she says.
She gazes at Robert with a look that seems to acknowledge that he has none.
That in many ways, he is one, too.
You can e-mail Candace Murphy at cmurphy@angnewspapers.com or call (925) 416-4814.
