Linda Cooper; Artist-poet (Beautiful tribute)
Hyfler/Rosner
Alzheimer's.
Joe Holley, Washington Post Staff Writer
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 her 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, even as the illness worked its
insidious way with Linda's mind.
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 millions 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 to douse the flames. 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 quickly became indispensable, helping Heinz
with the construction of his house and with his art
collection and investments.
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. "This is what she had to do."
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. She
failed a written scuba diving test, something she never
would have done under normal circumstances.
By the time her Alzheimer's was diagnosed in 1997, there was
no denying that she was seriously ill. Her father had died
of early-onset Alzheimer's; there is probably a genetic
component to the disease.
On the night they got the diagnosis, Barry went to a
late-night bookstore, where he sat on the floor for hours
and read everything available about the illness.
"But 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,
doing consulting from home. 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." She had written the line in 1980, long before its
essential meaning became clear.
Linda went on memantine, a drug long used in Europe to
combat the ravages of Alzheimer's. (Memantine became
available in this country in January.) In combination with a
drug called Aricept, it seemed to slow the progress of
Linda's disease. "These are priceless moments regained,"
Barry told a Food and Drug Administration panel last fall.
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 rides in the car.
Barry, with invaluable 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 with video clip 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. Getting
companion-care restrooms in public places is high on the
list of aims, along with a nationwide system of caregiver
cooperatives. Tax-exempt status came through last week.
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."
Bill Schenley
> Alzheimer's.
> Joe Holley, Washington Post Staff Writer
Yes. A moving tribute indeed ... Well, maybe not as moving as when
*I* posted it the day before ... but moving nonetheless ...