Linda Cooper, Artist, Left Lasting Lessons Of Courage
Bill Schenley
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32228-2004Sep18.html
(w/photo)
On a Wednesday night, beer night at Arlington's popular Rock Bottom
Restaurant and Brewery, a tall, bespectacled fellow with a white beard
and a fringe of white hair has been standing for some time outside the
women's restroom. Whenever the door opens, he cranes his neck and
tries to peer inside.
Three women are watching him; they are getting more and more
perturbed. One of them strides over. "Excuse me," she says, an edge to
her voice. "Can I help you?"
"As a matter of fact, you can," Barry Cooper tells her. "My wife is in
the restroom; she has Alzheimer's. Would you mind checking on her?"
Linda Cooper died Aug. 15 at age 61. In the seven years since the
diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's disease, the Coopers learned a
great deal about the indignities and inadequacies that people trying
to cope with the brain-wasting disease face every day, including
single-sex restrooms. They also learned what it means to live with
courage and resolve.
Linda and Barry met at a party in McLean in 1975. He was a Brooklyn
boy, working on a master's degree in health administration at George
Washington University. She was a single mother with two small
children. She was an artist and a poet, a Navy brat who had grown up
all over the world. They knew from that first night they were fated to
be together. They married in 1981 in a big wedding.
He was running a minority recruitment program in health
administration. Linda had gotten a secretarial job with the Huntington
T. Block Insurance Agency (now AON Huntington T. Block), which
specializes in fine arts insurance. It wasn't long before she had
parlayed her lively personality and her artistic acumen into a
position arranging coverage and protection for wealthy collectors. She
regularly worked with Lloyd's of London.
Barry and their friends enjoyed her story about the time she was
trying to convince a local collector who owned paintings worth million
s that he needed a fire-detection system for his mansion. As he sat in
an easy chair, smoking a pipe, pondering her arguments and politely
shaking his head no, smoke began to waft up from where he sat.
Bounding out of the smoldering chair, he raced to the kitchen and came
back with a pan of water. Nothing more needed to be said.
The Coopers moved to Southern California in 1984, and Linda went to
work for Clifford Stanton Heinz, a Newport Beach private investor and
brother to the late Pennsylvania senator.
She continued with her own painting and poetry. "This is her life,"
Barry said, nodding toward several impressionist-style paintings in
bright reds, blues and greens on the wall of the den.
She transformed their back yard into a verdant secret garden; she was
the unofficial interior decorator for their friends; she wrote letters
and notes in calligraphy. "She always had beauty around her," Barry
Cooper said.
They came back to the Washington area in 1990. Barry was vice
president of a Charlottesville-based company called Occupational
Health Strategies; Linda was working as an assistant to architect
James Freed on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and later as a fine
arts insurance specialist with Henderson Phillips Fine Arts.
At first, it was the little things: She had trouble remembering dates,
couldn't balance her checkbook, failed a written scuba diving test.
Alzheimer's was diagnosed in 1997. Her father had died of early-onset
Alzheimer's.
"The real change for me," he recalled, "was when I saw the movie 'Life
Is Beautiful,' the [Roberto] Benigni film. I realized that in the
movie the man was taking a child through a concentration camp, and the
child doesn't realize it, because he was normalizing the experience."
The film inspired him to spend his remaining years with Linda fully
and joyously. He cut back on his hours at work. They traveled -- to
Mexico, Florida, Bermuda. He tried to help her "normalize the
experience."
She was aware of what was happening to her and shared her husband's
determination to keep fighting. A line of poetry from her sketchbook
seemed to capture their newfound awareness: "Get rid of the clutter
that strangles your fate."
Linda went on memantine, a drug long used in Europe to combat the
ravages of Alzheimer's. In combination with a drug called Aricept, the
progress of Linda's disease seemed to slow.
After about six months, the disease renewed its assault, and Linda
began to slip away. Last fall, she began having psychotic episodes.
Barry, along with Linda's devoted caretaker, Nellie Stafford, looked
for little things to make her days easier. They listened to music by
her favorites, John Prine and Joe Cocker. They went for car rides.
Barry, with assistance from Stafford and the Alzheimer's Family Day
Center in Fairfax, was able to care for his wife at home.
He also bought a digital camera to help Linda remember their
experiences together. In the days since Linda's death, the pictures
have helped him remember. He also has organized a nonprofit
organization that will work to improve companion care for Alzheimer's
patients.
Barry Cooper has a message he learned from his wife: "The good things
in life don't have to end with a diagnosis of Alzheimer's. There's a
lot of life still to live."