My Family Moved from Creve Coeur...
By Christopher Duggan
My family moved from Creve Coeur to St. Charles County in 1979. It was before the building spree that would come later, transforming the open fields, pastures and farms into subdivision upon subdivision. The area was still very rural, very pastoral. We would have six acres of land around us (a vast expanse by suburban standards), and my mother could at last have something she'd always wanted: a sun room. My mother had a talent with anything that grows in the dirt, and she had been yearning for a place for her plants for years.
A former draftsman, my father designed our new house, and we did as much of the work as we could ourselves, including roofing and hanging drywall. The house, however, was not built with a sunroom. The plan was to add it later. It didn't happen immediately, but after about six years of my mother asking about it, my father designed and built a wood and glass structure onto the front of the house, cutting away a portion of the front wall in the process to create an entry into the sunroom. It sat on a large concrete slab that he poured and surfaced himself. This was the same man whom I had watched build decks, fences and all manner of other things, but with the sunroom, I started to get the feeling that there was nothing he couldn't do. It turned out that he would have yet another surprise for everyone.
About seven years ago, my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease. She had been doing more and more inexplicable things in the months leading up to the diagnosis: neglecting her hygiene, making odd statements out of nowhere and forgetting things she had been told just minutes earlier. Ultimately, the awful reality of what was happening to her became impossible to deny.
For the next six years, as the disease took its cruel toll on her, my father took on the 24-hour-a-day job of taking care of her, including feeding her, bathing her, taking her to the restroom, administering her medicines and seeing to her every need. He transformed the house into an Alzheimer's care center and continued, with all of his responsibilities, to maintain those six acres. I never once heard him complain.
Late last July, he finally decided she needed a level of clinical care he could not provide and made the hard decision to finally place her in a nursing home. She passed away a week later.
At her visitation and funeral, friends and family came up to him and said the same things over and over: “It’s amazing how you took care of her all that time.” “Unbelievable.” “Inspiring.”
His response was simply, “I thought that was just what people did.”
Today, he still lives in that house, with the green, growing things all around, the six acres, my mother’s decorating schemes in every room and, on the front, the greenhouse.
