Walk to End Alzheimer's: 'You aren't alone'

Oct. 5—Here's something to think about the next fall football Saturday you show up at the gate with your ticket in hand, Debbie Spiker said.

The number of people suffering from Alzheimer's and related dementia in the Mountain State, she said, could easily fill Marshall's Joan C. Edwards stadium in Huntington to standing room-only capacity.

Add family and other caregivers, she said, and you'll get the equivalent of a sell-out crowd at WVU's twice-as-large Milan Puskar Stadium in Morgantown.

One person every 67 seconds in America and elsewhere, according to numbers culled from the national Alzheimer's Association, is hit with the onset of the disease that deletes memories and erases lives.

Your mom.

Your dad.

Your husband or your wife.

Your big sister, your little brother, your saintly grandmother and that witty cousin you loved to hang out with at the family reunion.

Someday, it might even be you, falling under the cruel, inexorable plod of those 67 seconds.

"Alzheimer's has a big shadow, " Spiker said.

That's why she wants you to take big steps (or little steps) Oct. 15 at Mountaineer Mall.

Spiker is a volunteer and organizer with the Tri-Chapter of the Walk to End Alzheimer's, which takes in Monongalia, Preston and Marion counties.

Oct. 15 is the date of this year's walk at the "old mall " on Green Bag Road and it's not too late to sign up, Spiker said.

Registration is easy, she said. Just visit www.alz.org and click on the "Find Your Local Walk " button.

That's also the website of the national Alzheimer's Association, and it's brimming with links to resources for families dealing with the diagnosis.

Locally, WVU's Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute on the Evansdale medical campus is another, she said.

"There are so many places you can turn to, " Spiker said.

"I always tell families two things: You aren't alone, and don't be afraid to ask for help."

Alone was definitely how Spiker felt in the days after her mother was diagnosed with the disease that robs people first of their memories, then their lives.

May Richards, her daughter remembers, was an accomplished woman.

She was smart, funny and musically talented, her daughter said — especially so, on the latter.

Richards was a pianist and organist who directed church choirs in Parkersburg and her neighboring hometown of Belpre, Ohio, for several years.

Whenever a movie house in the vicinity would bring back a silent film for a revival, Spiker remembered, it was her mother who was enlisted to play the organ to accompany the action, in that magical corner in the dark, down from the big screen.

"Isn't that neat ?" asked Spiker, who helped care for her mother during her Alzheimer's journey.

Her caregiver story, she said, is the same story of everyone who ever lost someone they love to the ravages of the disease.

A cure, she said, would be the most beautiful thing in the world.

Or, if not a cure, a daughter said, at least more treatments to slow the march: so people can have more time, to cast more moments — gossamer, though, they may be.

You can't have advances in treatment if you don't have the dollars for research, Spiker said, and that's where the walk comes in.

With a disease that's cruelly about the loss of memory, those memories of May Richards, her daughter said, are really all she has now.

"She was always there for people, " Spiker said.

"She'd give you a hug, then she'd say just the right thing. Mom always knew what say. And I really miss those hugs."