A Thanksgiving tribute to my Dad, to close Alzheimer's Awareness Month

As this Thanksgiving weekend marks the end of Alzheimer’s Awareness Month, I want to express my gratitude to all those devoting their creativity, passion and compassion to putting an end to this incredible human challenge. In a pharmaceutical company, we necessarily focus daily on disease at the population level. But today, I would like to take the opportunity to share one individual’s story, my Dad’s, who was truly an n=1. In doing so, I also want to put back into the universe a few of the memories that were taken from him over the last decade.

On November 15, 2019, My Dad, Henry Lee “Bud” Tanner, was victorious in his long battle against Alzheimer’s disease. Not victorious by virtue of a cure, but by showing us a journey, through every stage, that was characterized by his gentle strength.

My Dad was born and raised in the Bay Area with a brother and two sisters. He spent time at the Coast Guard Academy and in the Army, and played a lot of baseball, basketball, football, befriended a Giants hall-of-famer; and was a dedicated Giants, 49ers and Warriors fan for life.

My Dad was an avid runner, and intensely competitive, though mostly with himself. He ran the first ever San Francisco Marathon, back when it was supremely hilly, and his last marathon at age 73 surrounded by family. 

My Dad led a quiet small-town life in Oregon, where he moved our family when I was 5 to take advantage of the opportunity to spend more time in nature, and more time skiing locally. He was not a scientist by profession, but I learned how to be a scientist from him. He approached every aspect of his life as one. He started brewing his own beer in the 80’s before it was a “thing”. He didn’t buy beer brewing kits, like most people might have. He gathered different varieties of yeast, barley, hops, and just experimented: designing, documenting and rating on a multitude of parameters, the hundreds of combinations he tried over the next two decades. (I have found over 400 ‘experiments’ in his notebooks. I’m thinking just maybe I can use his data to build a generative AI model that will suggest beer recipes from the mind of my Dad). Looking back, I realize that, though he enjoyed it, he wasn’t in it for the beer, but for the community of friendships it created, always letting people know they were welcome at our home.

My Dad further leveraged his yeast expertise to become a sourdough aficionado, probably inspired by his San Francisco roots. This was also not approached half-heartedly. Whenever we would go on vacation, he would bring sourdough starter to collect the yeast circulating natively in that environment, dehydrate it, and add it to his yeast collection. He would pit organisms head-to-head for their sourdough making ability. While across the country in graduate school, every once in a while, I would open the mail to find a zip lock bag of a yeast he had collected from some vacation I couldn’t join. (A bit concerning after 9/11 when they began irradiating mail at the Princeton post office!).

My Dad was unstoppable. We would drive the 12 hours back to the Bay Area to visit family every summer – most times all in one stretch, with rationed bathroom breaks, in our International Scout, which according to my Dad’s records, logged more than 500,000 miles over its lifetime. One year as we were driving back, 8 hours into the trip home, the gas pedal fell off of the car from pure metal fatigue. We were not towed… we did not spend a night in a hotel… and despite the car’s seemingly outright rebellion, it did not get to rest. My Dad grabbed a rope and a baseball bat, and rigged up a lever-system so that when he pulled up on the bat, the car would accelerate. Four…hours…later, we arrived home. On another trip, to Orcas Island, off the coast of Washington state, we went camping for a week with 3 of my nieces and nephews. The packing and preparation for the trip were masterful. He forgot only one small thing… the tent poles. Did he move to a hotel? Nope. Did he go to the sporting goods store and rent a tent? Nope. He turned to my niece and said, “Duct tape fixes everything!” and went to work. It was not pretty, but that tent stood (more or less) for the entire week.

My Dad was fortunate that his journey with Alzheimer’s was slow, calm, and peaceful. Somehow before each loss of independence, he seemed to first lose the piece of himself that would have been upset by that. In the early days, he would lead my Mom on 10-mile daily walks, because he lost his sense of time. Even up until two or three years ago, he retained an uncanny competence at ping pong. Long after he lost the ability to even know what ping pong was, if you would lead him to the table and put the paddle in his hands, he could then take it away from there, beating all the grandkids.

My Dad, as a strong, healthy man, and perhaps because of his competitive nature, lived every stage of the disease for as long as possible. Through this, he taught us that even a life stripped down to a smaller form, is meaningful to the family surrounding him. Last summer, he was able to meet his last grandchild, who is his namesake. An unexpected milestone at the time, because when he was born, both were in the ICU in different cities. Just two weeks before he passed, my nephew drove that same 12-hours-in-a-day journey from the Bay Area with his brand-new family, and my Dad was able to meet his first great-grandchild, sharing his classic “Bud Tanner” smile with one more person. Anyone’s life will be better for having met my Dad, even if so briefly.

My Dad was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease in 2010, just before I joined Janssen Neuroscience, but there was never an expectation that a cure would be developed ‘fast enough’ for him. And that’s ok; my Dad was strong enough and tough enough for this one last endurance race. He could handle this. He could handle anything. But I know his one remaining wish is to spare his children, grandchildren and now great-grandchildren’s families, and really all of humanity, from the same bittersweet journey.

Thank you to all who are working to make my Dad's wish a reality, and thank you to all the caregivers and the incredible community of supporters, who make today’s reality brighter.

Happy Thanksgiving,

Gayle