Here’s something to think about the next fall football Saturday you show up at the gate with your ticket in hand, Debbie Spiker said.
The number of people suffering from Alzheimer’s and related dementia in the Mountain State could easily fill Marshall’s Joan C. Edwards stadium in Huntington to standing-room-only capacity.
Add family and other caregivers, she said, and you’ll get the equivalent of a sell-out crowd at WVU’s twice-as-large Milan Puskar Stadium in Morgantown.
One person every 67 seconds in America and elsewhere, according to numbers culled from the national Alzheimer’s Association, is hit with the onset of the disease that deletes memories and erases lives.
Your mom.
Your dad.
Your husband or your wife.
Your big sister, your little brother, your saintly grandmother and that witty cousin you loved to hang out with at the family reunion.
Someday, it might even be you, falling under the cruel, inexorable plod of those 67 seconds.
“Alzheimer’s has a big shadow,” Spiker said.
Which is why she wants you take a shot at one of those big purses next weekend at Mylan Park.
Spiker is the organizer of the “Stuffed Designer Purse Bingo” event, which is at 1 p.m., Sunday, Aug. 13 at the Mon Community Center in the park’s expanse.
All 100% of the proceeds go to the region’s Tri-County Chapter of the Walk to End Alzheimer’s, which takes in Monongalia, Preston and Marion counties.
“The money will go to research, programming and caregiver support,” Spiker said.
Call it a serious mission for a fun afternoon, she said.
The event features a bevy of big-name purses — Kate Spade, Michael Kors and the like — brimming with candles, coffee mugs and other accessories.
Each purse carries a theme: there’s a WVU tailgating take, celebrations of Halloween and St. Patrick’s Day, an Americana offering and more, Spiker said.
Tickets are $25 at the door. It’s $20 if you get yours in advance. Call or text her at 304-288-3729 for more information.
The Alzheimer’s Association website — www.alz.org — is also a good source of information for events here and across the region, she said.
Spiker’s chapter is also about all-terrain buggies and rollbars.
The Tri-County Chapter is cranking up a “Ride to Remember” off-road fundraiser Aug. 19 at Pretzel Arena in Bruceton Mills, with the help of the Country Roads Trail system in Preston County.
Her chapter’s signature fundraiser, though, is its annual Walk to End Alzheimer’s event, which will be Oct. 15 at Mountaineer Mall.
In this particular moment, however, Spiker said, her dining room table at home is laden with handbags.
And her garage is full of all those fun items that will eventually be stuffed into them.
She’s just gotten started on that part of the proceedings, with May Richards looking over her shoulder the whole time, she said.
Richards is her mother, who died from Alzheimer’s complications in 2014.
“She had it for eight years,” Spiker said. “Maybe longer.”
May Richards, her daughter remembers, was smart, funny and musically talented.
She was a pianist and organist who was a choir director at churches in Parkersburg and her neighboring hometown of Belpre, Ohio, for several years.
Whenever a movie house in the vicinity would bring back a silent film for a revival, it was Richards who was enlisted to play the organ to accompany the action, in that magical corner in the dark, down from the big screen.
“Isn’t that neat?” asked Spiker, who helped care for her mother during her Alzheimer’s journey.
Her caregiver story, she said, is the same story of everyone who ever lost someone they love to the ravages of the disease.
A cure, she said, would be the most beautiful thing in the world.
Or, if not a cure, a daughter said, at least more treatments to slow the march: so people can have more time, to cast more moments –— gossamer, though, they may be.
“I miss hearing her voice. She always knew just what to say.”
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