Slow Dancing with a Stranger Read Online Free PDF Page B

left the room in anger. I started to think that I should get the keys away from him before he seriously hurt himself or someone else, but I was foiled at every turn.
    Two weeks earlier, Harvey had gone to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get his license renewed. I was sure he would never pass and the problem would be resolved. But glimmers of the kind of person Harvey had been remained. The clerk behind the counter found him charming and amusing. She kept commenting on how much he looked like the comedian Steve Martin. When he hesitated during the test, unsure what the correct answer was, instead of letting him fail, the clerk gave him prompts for the correct answer. To sympathetic outsiders like her, nothing seemed dramatically amiss because Harvey did not look sick. I knew better.
    In fact, one of my main purposes in visiting the neurologist was to enlist outside support for my belief that Harvey shouldn’t drive anymore. Harvey had recently offered a ride home to a colleague who lived in the neighborhood. Simple directions became a maze of missed turns that they both joked off as being too preoccupied in their conversation. Harvey’s admission that his reaction time behind the wheel seemed slow signaled like a caution light that time was up trying to honor his independence. Someone could get seriously hurt.
    After the unsuccessful meeting with the neurologist, I decided to take action. I slipped into the garage one night and pulled the plugs on what I thought were the lines to the battery and circuitry to permanently cripple his car. For the next five years, I told Harvey that his car was in the shop getting repaired. It was an easy fib to maintain. Even then, Harvey didn’t have the presence of mind to check the garage himself where the car remained.
    The morning of the big lecture, he didn’t even ask to drive. He slid into the passenger seat and waited in stony silence for me to take charge. The drive to the hotel was short. Harvey clutched his slide decks on his lap, afraid to let them out of his sight after briefly failing to locate them that morning. I was reluctant to just drop him off at the entrance of the hotel for fear that he might get lost. Fortunately I spotted a member of his staff and commandeered help for Harvey with his briefcase and slide decks. We arranged a place to meet afterward. I parked the car and slipped into the back of the ballroom, standing where he would not see me.
    In every Alzheimer’s case, there is invariably a public episode that drives home the harsh reality and makes denial no longer an option professionally. That scenario is true for every public figure and celebrity who has ever been forced to own up to the disease. We applaud them as courageous, but they had no choice.
    For me and for his increasingly concerned colleagues at work, Harvey’s speech that day was such an episode. It was painful watching this brilliant man, renowned for his expertise in blood cancers, fumbling with his papers. Though he held the typed speech in front of him, he lost his place less than halfway through and never recovered. There were awkward pauses while he tried to retrace the steps of his argument. I heard attendees shifting in their seats, rustling papers, craning their necks to see him and try to understand what was going on. At one point, an uncomfortable rumble of laughter, a kind of snickering, seemed to wave across the ballroom. I wanted to stand up and shout to this room full of doctors with fancy titles and prestigious sinecures, supposedly trained in spotting the clinical symptoms of a disease, “Can’t you see this man is sick and needs help?” But I was so afraid of embarrassing Harvey even more that I stood there silently, waiting for it to be over. Finally, one of the organizers gently led him to his seat. He never finished the speech.
    On the drive back from the hotel, I felt bitter and angry about what had just happened. When we walked into the