SPOTLIGHT: Brette Polin

Each week we will be picking members to spotlight to tell their Alzheimer's story and why they are running in this year's New York City marathon. Check in each Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday for new updates on who will be spotlighted and get to know your teammates...(each person is picked at random)

As my Grandma Vivian is looking down on us, she’s smiling at this picture of her three granddaughters, myself and my sisters, Carly and Melanie, and her great-grandsons, Ryan and Drew (beautiful children by her granddaughter Beth and her husband Jordan and her grandson Jason and his wife Jessica). Grandma Vivian, my maternal grandmother, passed away in spring ’97 after years of suffering from Alzheimer’s and, later on, heart conditions. While I still choke up every time I share my grandmother’s story, I realize so many people relate and understand the evilness of the disease.

As the mother of three children, Ronald, Carol (my mom), and Alan, the wife to Benjamin, and a teacher, Grandma Vivian was a devoted, dedicated, loving, beautiful woman with a very big sweet heart who spent most of her life in Brooklyn, New York and many of her later winters in Boca Raton, Florida. She was a widow earlier in life when my grandfather passed away in ’79, and I always wonder if my grandfather had still been around if she would have overcome the disease or, at least, prolonged her deterioration. But as studies show, it has a genetic component—and my mom believes that her grandmother (my Grandma Vivian’s mother) suffered from it too. The scariest part, to me, is where it spreads from there…

My grandmother had caretakers the last years of her life, but, in my eyes, my mom was the true hero who really took care of her throughout the most challenging times and had to make many of the hard decisions for her. My mom experienced all the hardships firsthand and was the one who received the early phone calls from neighbors about my grandmother acting “strange” and asking “odd” questions—similar to most sufferers reverting back to their long lost past. As the stages progressed, my grandmother started becoming more and more remote and losing recognition of loved ones. When she past away, no one was emotionally prepared for her loss but mentally we knew she was at peace and so was the family’s anguish.

It’s in Grandma Vivian’s memory that I run my first marathon. I pray everyday that we can find a cure for this crippling disease—and that Ryan and Drew only know Alzheimer’s as a condition of the past, not the domino effect it can have on the future.