Alzheimer’s Makes Christmas Miracle a Mixed Blessing for La Mesa Couple

Lydia Peterson will never forget Christmas two years ago.

On Dec. 14, 1986, her husband, Paul Peterson, 58, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, disappeared from the couple’s home in La Mesa. He was gone for 12 days.

After an exhaustive search involving hundreds of people in two countries, he was found on a footbridge in Tijuana--barely clothed, badly dehydrated and barely alive.

He was in critical condition for days but made a complete recovery. Since then, however, his intellectual and emotional condition has eroded even more. His wife says his mind is like that of “a very small child.”

She said: “It’s impossible to say briefly what Christmas, 1986, was like.”

Because of the good will of those who helped her--”for the most part, perfect strangers, great people”--she was given peace of mind, in the miracle of her husband’s return. She calls it the kind of peace no other Christmas can match.

Serene Image Belies Pain

Thursday afternoon, Lydia Peterson, 51, sat on a bench in front of The Coffee Merchant, the emporium that she and her husband operate at Grossmont Center. To the dozens of shoppers who walked by nervously, frenetically, the Petersons must have looked like any other middle-aged couple--outwardly, more relaxed than most, happier and more serene.

Paul Peterson, gray-bearded and distinguished, laughed giddily while watching his 3-year-old grandson play. Suddenly, he got up to grab several newspapers off the floor.

One of the Petersons’ three daughters walked up and said with a laugh: “Dad, do you think you have enough newspapers?”

Lydia Peterson said that her husband’s disease causes her a feeling of “incredible isolation” in a life that, somewhat to her surprise, “is full of joys. It’s a grim disease, always present in my mind, and yet I wonder how I stay so . . . happy. It must be something in the body chemistry that makes a person happy or depressed. I’ve always felt a joy just to be alive. Now is no different.”

Mr. Peterson does not require the help of even a part-time nurse--his wife said it simply isn’t needed. He grows agonizingly frustrated, even bitter, with the total deterioration of a once razor-like mind, an erosion belied by dramatic physical progress.

“At times, this has been a real mixed blessing,” Lydia said, fighting back tears. “He was so close to death, and then to have found him. . . . But you wonder at times, what’s the sense in bringing someone back when they have to endure such hell. As childish and as incoherent as he is, he’s never lost the understanding that something awful has happened to his mind.

“Sometimes he’ll say, ‘Why don’t they just shoot me? I don’t have a brain.’ He has to face every day with that realization. This thing is nothing less than the ultimate destruction of a person’s self-image.”

Lydia Peterson remembers her husband first showing the symptoms of Alzheimer’s in 1979, when suddenly, inexplicably, he grew very forgetful. Once as gifted in woodworking as the savviest carpenter, his creations took on a crude, childlike coarseness. He lost the ability, in her words, “to figure anything out.”

Reduced to the Elementary

“That’s the way it is,” she said. “Gradually, every learned behavior is lost, forgotten. Un learned. You’re reduced to the most elementary functions. Manners are affected. Knowing the appropriate thing to say. How to dress yourself, how to keep yourself clean. . . . Pretty soon, all of it goes.

“It isn’t anything like dealing with a child. When you’re raising a child, you’re always seeing light and hope, glimpses into a bright future. You know that, each time they do things, they’ll learn to do more.

“This is a reversal of that process. You start out with something and end up with nothing. Each day brings, to some extent, new disappointment. And the victim is aware of it. Each day, he grows a little more unhappy. He’ll sometimes ask, out of the blue, ‘Can anything be done to help me? Can anyone out there help?’ ”

And for her, while it’s a life she would never choose, “I feel very useful,” she said with a wry laugh. “I can’t imagine feeling more useful. Sometimes, I think this is why we’re here. We’re on earth to tackle problems.”

She paused and, with a slight smile, added: “If life were too easy, we wouldn’t be doing what we’re supposed to do.”