“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” —often attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson
My good Irish friend John Joe Vaughan from New Ross in County Wexford, Ireland, south of Dublin, was a man of boundless wisdom, perseverance, love, and faith—all that lay within him. John Joe died peacefully on July 25 at age 88 after a bruising battle with Alzheimer’s.
He is one of a score or more of close friends taken in recent years by this demon that also has come for me.
John Joe’s daughter Rena was at her father’s bedside in Ireland at his passing. She texted me minutes after he passed away: “I was with Dad when he took his final breath in the nursing home. His eyes opened in peace, and he looked right at me…on his way to Heaven!”
In so many ways, John Joe embodied the daunting struggle today against Alzheimer’s and other dementias and diseases, and the need for far more research funding. He seldom complained; self-pity was not his thing. Living by example was John Joe’s calling card, as a loving father of eight with his devoted wife Peggy, a grandfather of 17, a retired teacher and school principal, and an artist, raised in rural Marshalstown, then without electricity and paved roads.
Over the years, John Joe and I became surrogate brothers, joined in a bout against Alzheimer’s and other dementias—from Cape Cod to the Irish Sea and far beyond. We first met by chance many years ago at Logan Airport in Boston upon my return from Dublin after an annual pilgrimage to Erie with family. This was no brief encounter at Logan. John Joe had just arrived from Ireland himself to visit his daughter Rena, who now lives in New Hampshire with her husband. While I was on the cellphone at an airport restaurant responding to a queue of backlogged voicemails, Rena began waving at me. She recognized me from a photo in my book, On Pluto: Inside the Mind of Alzheimer’s.
“I want you to meet my father,” she told me after my call, noting that her dad had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and wouldn’t talk about the disease until he read On Pluto. She had given him a copy. “This guy gets me,” Rena said her dad told her.
I was humbled, but that was just the beginning. The Lord works in mysterious ways.
John Joe had a smile that would light up the River Liffey and the handshake of a heavyweight champion. He embraced me, eyeball to eyeball, and I saw the tears streaming down the side of his creased, righteous face.
I cried, too.
“I know how it feels,” he said to me. “We fight together now as brothers, right?”
“Right,” I said!
We kept in touch, and he invited me and my wife Mary Catherine to Ireland to stay for a week at a family vacation home on the Irish Sea in the fishing village of Duncannon, out on a peninsula at the mouth of rivers Barrow, Nore, and Suir, overlooking the majestic 800-year-old Hook Head Light, the oldest active lighthouse in the world.
John Joe had one proviso—that we’d sit in a nearby pub and talk over a pint or two about living with Alzheimer’s, not dying with a disease that can take 20 years or more to run its twisted course. I wrote about this encounter 10 years ago in a Psychology Today blog—the beginning of a long, enduring friendship. It merits some repeating.
Early on in my journey, John Joe counseled me on how to fight disease, not give into it, how to rise above it. And I am forever grateful for that. It changed my life. I’m 75 now.
“I’m emotional about all this,” John Joe told me at the pub. “I can’t control that; it’s the card I was dealt…I refuse to give in. So I fight on. What scares me about this disease is the loss of memory and the inability to carry a conversation. The brain just isn’t processing; it’s stalled. It’s embarrassing. So I often avoid conversation. I retreat into myself. People who know me say, ‘He’s changed a lot!’”
“I may have tears in my eyes,” he added, “but I’m not crying out of sorrow. It’s part of what I’ve been handed. I was blessed with a good family that gives me strength. I have no cause for complaint. I laugh, like you, at how long it takes me to remember, and rage against the darkness of my mind. I know at some point, the light goes out forever…If a cure comes, it will likely come from America. I hope you call me up some day and say: “John Joe, I have a little pill for you…”
“You’ll get the first call,” I assure him.
John Joe is not answering calls now. But his life is a call to action for others worldwide to fight on with what lies within in full faith, hope, and humor in the face of dreadful diseases and loss. All that takes is a role model. That’s John Joe’s gift to life.
Looking back, two Irish guys in a pub, coming full circle near the Irish Sea, separated by 2,992 miles, connected for a lifetime by a disease that will take their lives. In some ways, it doesn’t get any better…
Rest in peace, my friend!