Tom and I with our “original 5.” Photo Credit: Jake Burton After my Christmas revelation via our former pastor, I did something I’ll never regret. First, I wrote my mother and told her the Reader’s Digest version of our story. Although we spoke every few days, I had not yet shared my concerns for Tom’s health. I knew it was time—past time. And in my typical style, I found it easier to write than speak (especially since I knew this story would come with tears). After I wrote the letter, I realized something else: It summed up a huge area of our lives that I had kept hidden from almost everyone. I was already on the hunt for a new neurologist, but we needed much more than that. We needed prayer. I’ve shared plenty of the mistakes I made on our journey, but at this point, God moved me to do something I’ve never regretted. I had an email list of friends who had supported our family in prayer on various mission trips through the years. I quickly pulled names and addresses together for a new “Pieper Prayer Team,” added a note at the top and forwarded my letter to Mom to my praying friends. I expected prayer. But I didn’t expect the peace and power I experienced as responses came flooding in and prayers went flying up. I had fought to protect Tom for so long. Now, I told myself, the support mattered much more than any remaining fear of what people would think. I also received wise counsel from various friends who had either a medical background or caregiving experience. Almost without my realizing it, the Lord had surrounded me, physically and virtually, with a wonderful team. But Tom and I already had a smaller, more intimate team that had loved and supported us for years. Our five adult children (and two children-in-love) listened, loved and helped—each in his or her own way. Even as they grieved the reality of what was happening to their dad, they also urged me to keep seeking answers. I also consulted with them all about a big change I planned to make. I’d decided to sell our home and move to South Carolina, close to our oldest daughter and her family and also to our second daughter, who lives just two hours away. I knew we could support each other no matter what might come our way. Once again, what seemed like several insurmountable tasks lay before me. We still needed a diagnosis for Tom. My salary and freelance work could cover our expenses—barely. Our home would need some repairs and upgrading before we could put it on the market. And...

“Whatever you do, if they take you out to lunch, don’t hold your drink like that.” Photo by Nira Giri on Unsplash Two close friends gave Tom this advice as they sat at one of our favorite Charleston restaurants (we lived on one of Charleston’s barrier islands before we moved to Florida). The year was 2007, and these two prominent businessmen were giving him tips as he prepared to interview for a ministry job in the Orlando area. But what difference would the way he held his drink make? When he told me about their comment, I knew exactly what they meant. Tom has what doctors call an “essential tremor” in his right hand. I don’t remember that he had it when we first met more than 40 years ago, but I do know he’s had it for a long time. This genetic condition causes involuntary shaking and can occur almost anywhere in the body, but most often in the hands, especially when performing activities such as tying shoes or drinking from a glass. The Mayo Clinic says it “is usually not a dangerous condition, but it typically worsens over time and can be severe in some people.” Tom’s sweet tea, in the grand old Southern tradition, came in a heavy glass. His friends noticed his hand shaking and didn’t want it to signal any sort of problem. I’m not sure if he remembered not to hold a glass during the interview process, but he did get the job, and our family moved to Florida that July. I bring up the tremor because it was yet another symptom I questioned when I became concerned about other issues and began our quest for a diagnosis. Tom’s first neurologist was the one who told me it was called an essential tremor, and that it was “nothing to be concerned about; lots of people have them.” At his casual words, I heaved an inner sigh. I had plenty of other thins to be concerned about. But of course back then, I didn’t realize how many. Only a few months after that visit, as I sat in church with Tom one summer Sunday, he put his arm around me, and I noticed it was shaking violently. His tremor, I thought. It seems so much worse. But then I realized something that concerned me even more: It was the wrong arm. I didn’t realize it then, but Tom was experiencing great stress. Our pastor told me during my lifechanging pre-Christmas visit that no matter what they discussed before the service or how similar the order of worship was each week, one of the many things Tom couldn’t seem to remember was when he should...

It began with a gift. A simple Christmas gift. But it turned into so much more. Kringler (Dansk Kringle) Every year, our family carries out a tradition my mother began. Although we don’t have a Danish background, we bake a filled Danish coffeecake called Kringler at Christmas. My mother always made several to share with neighbors, co-workers and special friends, and I do the same. Some year, just like Mom, I’ve made more than 20 of these delectable treats. This December, my list was small. Our life seemed that way too. The year 2018 had been another year of challenge. Tom and I continued our marriage counseling. Our counselors had stopped it that spring for several months because of his lack of progress. They wanted to see what the neurologist and neuropsychologist said, but once those doctors cleared him, we moved forward once again. But 2018 was also the year I turned 60, and that July, my children surprised me with a family party and photos. I remember our oldest daughter saying, “Mom. You have to find a new neurologist. Dad dropped the ball multiple times when we were putting this together.” “But we did see another doctor,” I reminded her, referring to the many hours of testing with the neuropsychologist. I already felt overwhelmed with work and ministry and marriage. How could I even think about finding a new doctor? But all too soon, life forced me to think about just that. Because in late November, Tom acted on another “terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad” idea and lost a job he loved. A job he’d held for more than five years. Just a few weeks later, he made another bad decision in a temporary delivery position he’d found. Another job loss. What was happening? But Christmas is still the celebration of our Savior’s birth, and I still had so much to thank Him for, including the fact that I had a job and could work. That Christmas, I stopped by our former pastor’s house to bring him and his wife a Kringler. They had retired from the church in June, and although they knew about what had happened, I hadn’t spoken with them at all. In fact, I had barely spoken to anyone about it because I knew I would fall apart. My work schedule meant I finally showed up at my friends’ house with their gift on Dec. 24. They graciously invited me in, and when our former pastor asked me about what had happened, my tears flowed. I still look back on that day as a turning point. Not because I was finally sharing our struggles, as huge as that was, but because before I got...

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay “But he seems so normal.” “I can’t even tell there’s anything wrong.” “He’s still so funny!’ “Are you sure?” I’ve heard all of these statements and more in our journey to and beyond Tom’s diagnosis with early-onset dementia (in his case, frontotemporal degeneration, or FTD). I don’t blame anyone for saying these things. Tom looks normal. He can still carry on a conversation. He still dresses, bathes and feeds himself (granted, he needs lots of reminders these days.) He still has his trademark sense of humor. In other words, he’s still very much Tom. And yet as I’ve shared, his dementia has stolen so much of his life. He can no longer hold down a job, drive or manage finances. Other than a few simple songs, he can no longer play his beloved trumpet. He has trouble making even the simplest of decisions. And the online golf game he loves? I’ve had to not-so-jokingly ban him from calling himself “stupid” or “moron” the many times he fails to make a shot. And as I’ve also shared, Tom has made other “terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad” decisions that have hurt himself and our family. For a season, he withdrew in large part from his relationships with me and with our children. Although he has declined in his cognitive ability in multiple ways, few are immediately obvious. His short-term memory seems to get shorter all the time. On average, he “loses” objects at least five times a day, often convinced they are gone forever and amazed when I easily find them. His appetite for sweets, always strong, has become voracious, and before a recent surgery, his obsession with walking (something he rarely wanted to do prior to this year) had increased so much that we were walking anywhere between 14,000-18,000 steps a day (yes, I’m thankful that so far, the last two seem to balance each other out!). And yet no one who saw him for a few minutes or even a couple of hours would know any of this (unless, of course, they’d been reading these posts). So yes: “He seems so normal.” And before my experience with Tom’s dementia, I know I looked at other dementia patients and thought the same thing. Oh, the disease must not be as bad as they thought. She seems so normal. Dementia is like many other disabilities in that it often remains hidden. Some of you have praised my transparency now. But in the three-plus years it took us to obtain a diagnosis, I kept very quiet. I shared my concerns with a tiny handful of close friends and our children. After all, the doctors kept saying...

Photo by William Hook on Unsplash Sometimes, dementia has a humorous side. Tom and I have a running joke about his “good ideas.” Part of him realizes he doesn’t always make the right choices, but not enough to keep him from making the next wrong choice. One dementia spouse described it this way: “The part of him that says, ‘That’s not a good idea’? That’s gone. If you’ve been following these posts, you may have noticed a few of these “good ideas,” some much more serious than others. Here are a few more: —One day, I came home to a horrible smell. He couldn’t tell me what had happened, but I quickly figured out that Tom had poured nearly a quart of gasoline down our kitchen sink. Our son had drained the gas from a scooter he was repairing, and Tom decided we needed to get rid of it. (Besides the judgment problem, this incident helped me realize he had lost his sense of smell, also courtesy of his disease.) —Another day, I came home to find scraps of one of my thin acrylic cutting boards in the trash. When he couldn’t find the pan he wanted, Tom had used the board as a baking pan for a can of cinnamon rolls. He knew something was wrong, but when I asked him about it, he couldn’t even name the “pan” he had used. (He also said the rolls tasted fine!) Just as with the gasoline, God’s grace prevented a fire. —One memorable evening found me typing away in my upstairs office when I heard a sound no one wants to hear: a scream, then a crash. I must have skipped several stairs in my hurry to reach a moaning Tom, now lying on the floor of our two-story great room. Determined to put up a new television antenna he’d received for Christmas, he had climbed to the top of our 12-foot ladder and stood on top. When he still couldn’t reach the window ledge where he hoped to place the antenna, he began to make his way back down and, as he said, “only” fell from the eight-foot level. The emergency room doctor was amazed that he ended up with no broken bones or other serious injuries. I was too. —Last August, while we were staying with our friends awaiting the sale of our home, Tom locked himself out of his cell phone, something that has happened multiple times before and since. Convinced it was broken, he wanted to visit the cell phone store. The problem? I was at work, and the friends we were staying with couldn’t take him to the store till later that afternoon. An adult...