GREELEY — Stepping into his favorite dispensary one day last year, Tony Sanchez became angry.
The shop in Garden City, he thought, was supposed to let him know when the strain he likes has been restocked. He didn’t receive a call.
“I’m going to shoot you, and then her, for making me upset,” Tony, 73, told two workers — as they later recounted to police.
Then, after buying some pot, he climbed into his old Volkswagen Beetle and drove the roughly 5 miles to his home in Greeley.
It was June 2018. Three years earlier, a doctor diagnosed him with Alzheimer’s disease. He has been fighting for his independence ever since, refusing to give in to the disease that is constantly gnawing away at his mind.
Alzheimer’s is a vein that stretches deep within the family. Tony has seen the changes it brought in his father and former mother-in-law. Now the disease has both him and his ex-wife in its grasp — a fate he’s fighting, but she’s resigned to.
On that day in June, Tony didn’t give the dispensary trip another thought after buying marijuana and driving away. But then came the call from police, wanting to know if he had visited the pot shop.
Yes, Tony said, he was there.
Did he threaten any of the workers?
“No, I don’t remember doing that at all,” Tony told the officers.
He didn’t believe he said such a thing. Is there video footage, Tony asked, to show what happened? There is; it didn’t have sound.
But it’s in the police report. It’s why officers called his wife. And it’s why there’s a court order preventing him from returning to the dispensary.
Alzheimer’s disease has made Tony forget before, but on that day seven months ago, he got his first glimpse of a future without his memories.
“The Sarge”
Tony used to be rowdy. Growing up in a poor section of Oakland, Calif., taught him not to start fights, but not to back down from them either. “Let’s face it, you learned how to fight or you joined a gang,” he says.
His self-described bossy demeanor is why his children and wife call him a sergeant. He likes structure and to be in charge. When he sets out to do something, he goes on a mission.
He’s “the Sarge.”
As he’s grown older, and as Alzheimer’s erodes his memories, Tony has become more apprehensive. Mass shootings — in churches, in schools, in movie theaters — in particular have become ingrained in his mind.
He gets angry more than he should since the diagnosis four years ago. The anger, Tony says, comes from his irritation at forgetting.
“Sometimes I get so pissed off at myself, I take it out on Josie,” he says.
Not Josie. He means Teddy, his wife. He does that a lot, Tony says, mixing up the names of his wife and ex-wife.
Alzheimer’s disease, doctors say, doesn’t just create holes in a person’s memory. It can spawn delusions as a person tries to fill those gaps. The disease can affect its victims’ organizational skills to the point they struggle to pay bills. It can change their mood and personality, making them anxious, fearful or angry as symptoms set in.
Doctors have prescribed Tony medicine, Depakote ER, to treat aggression related to Alzheimer’s. He calls the drug his “don’t-get-mad pills.”
Tony has found that marijuana helps too. He has been smoking for decades, often taking his first hit by 10 a.m. after he walks Lucy, their black Lab mix, on a trail near his home. The pot relaxes him. It takes the edge off his anger. He’s less likely to snap at Teddy, Tony says.
Don’t you agree? he asks her.
“I don’t know, I guess,” Teddy says. “It mellows you out.”
Studies have shown that marijuana can reduce aggression and anxiety, but there are no signs that it can reduce Alzheimer’s disease itself, says Huntington Potter, director of the Rocky Mountain Alzheimer’s Disease Center.
Researchers have found that marijuana can curb the disease’s changes to the brain and improve memory in mice. But in humans, long-term use of marijuana can reduce blood flow to the brain, which can hurt short-term memory, he says.
Sitting on the couch in his living room on a sunny day in October, Tony says he knows he threatened the workers at the dispensary. It’s the first time Teddy has heard him accept responsibility. He’s been denying it since police called. The incident makes him feel like a “dodo bird.”
Still, he doesn’t remember.
“I’m sure there’s going to be more stupid things I’ll do when I go up to somebody and say, ‘Can you help me? I don’t know who I am,’ ” Tony says.
It’s frustrating forgetting. He can feel his wife and children looking — waiting — for him to depend on them more as the disease progresses.
And slowly, he is.
He’s no longer the Sarge.
Like father, like son
Tony’s father mostly raised him and his brother. His parents divorced when he was in the third grade. His mother didn’t show up to the custody hearing. “I wish we could have been closer,” Tony says. “I don’t think I was really in love with my mom.”
Tony says he stole a car when he was 16.
While visiting family in Denver, he went to a used car lot. His cousin’s boyfriend pushed the car out into the alley and jumped into the driver’s seat. Tony was riding shotgun.
They went to pick up his cousin and other friends. They bought booze. Then they got busted in Golden.
When the police showed up, Tony and the others jumped out of the car and ran. His cousin hid under the car.
After officers caught them, Tony ended up in a juvenile detention center for two weeks. Officials told his father that he could come get Tony after about a week, but his father waited until the court hearing.
“That was probably the maddest I’ve seen him in my life,” Tony says.
Years ago, around 1999, Tony’s father came from California for a visit. It was Fourth of July weekend and they went to a parade.
That weekend, Tony’s father, who had already been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, kept forgetting him.
I’m your son, Tony would tell him.
Now, it’s Tony who is facing a future in which he might forget his children.
“It won’t hurt me not knowing who they are,” Tony says, crying. “It will hurt them.”
“Fighting” Alzheimer’s
It’s hard thinking about the future, and what’s going to happen as his memory wilts further.
Once symptoms appear, a person can live with Alzheimer’s for more than a decade before they die. There will be no cure in Tony’s lifetime. He hopes for one for his children, but that’s not likely to happen. Scientists are struggling just to create treatments that will slow the progression of the disease, much less cure it.
“God, I can’t imagine a woman wiping my butt or putting a spoon in my mouth like I’m a little child, an infant,” Tony says.
Is this the future he has to look forward to?
“No, I can’t think of that,” Tony says. “That’s why I have to keep going to the gym and fighting it and fighting it and fighting it.”
Exercise, Tony has heard, helps dampen the progression of Alzheimer’s. So he tries to go to the gym five days a week to lift weights and walk on the treadmill. He takes his dog, Lucy, on walks four or five times a day.
At least twice a week, Tony hops in his car and drives a little more than 2 miles to Fairacres Manor, a local nursing home to visit Josie, his ex-wife and mother of five of his six children.
One day in August, Tony walks into the nursing home, carrying cookies for his visit.
“Do you feel any different because you have Alzheimer’s?” Josie asks.
“I’m starting to,” he replies.
Unlike Tony, Josie already has come to terms with having to depend on her children and caretakers at the nursing home. One of her daughters takes her to Mass on the weekends and helps with laundry. Josie is the one who decided to move into the nursing home.
Before the doctor’s verdict, she had envisioned a retirement filled with travel. She has been to Cuba and the Bahamas and wanted to go to more “wonderful places.”
But Josie’s health took a turn several years ago. She has nerve damage in her right foot. She needs dialysis three times a week. She had a stroke.
Maybe instead of traveling, Josie says, she is meant to learn how to live with her illnesses and pain. Her Catholic faith, she says, keeps her positive.
“That’s the way it’s supposed to be,” she says. “Why fight it? Go with the flow.”
Tony is more reluctant to give up his independence. His children have started worrying about his driving. What if he gets lost? What if he’s in an accident?
One of his daughters, Cindee Gierhart, 45, and her husband sometimes follow Tony as he drives to check on him. Tony doesn’t know.
The day is coming when he will have to hand over his keys, Tony says, but it’s not here yet. Doing so would mean he’d no longer be able to go to the gym or take the dog to the park.
He’s not ready to surrender to Alzheimer’s disease.
Accepting fate
There are times, Tony thinks, he won’t die of Alzheimer’s disease, that he won’t die at all. He doesn’t feel sick. He doesn’t feel differently than he was before. Too much is being made about him having Alzheimer’s.
But his family sees that Tony is changing.
His son, Jason, stopped by one day in 2017 and raised the issue of Tony keeping a gun in the house. When he was younger, Tony used to take Jason hunting. They’d go out looking to shoot rabbits, deer, elk and pheasants.
Tony’s children, Jason later says, are growing concerned that there’s a gun in his home. They don’t know how quickly his Alzheimer’s will progress.
Surprising Jason, after that conversation in 2017, Tony got up from the couch and went to his bedroom, where he grabbed the .22-caliber pistol and, without a fight, handed it to his son.
But a week later, Tony changed his mind and wanted the gun back. He needs it to protect his family, he says.
The gun is now back in the house, but hidden so only Teddy can find it.
There eventually will be another conversation about the gun, Jason says. “We know it’s going to be a fight with him because of his stubbornness and independence.”
There may come a time, Tony says, when he won’t know what he’s doing. He doesn’t want to be the person who may hurt his wife or someone else, which is why he initially gave Jason the gun. Tony wonders, “When I change, how will I change?”
Tony is slowly beginning to accept the finality of Alzheimer’s. He says he’s made his peace with God.
“It’s probably one of the best ways to go,” he says. “There’s no blood. There’s no pain.”
The pain, Tony says, is for the caregivers. He’s heard about the ones who become depressed while tending to loved ones with Alzheimer’s and doesn’t want that for Teddy.
But still, he has time.
“While I’m still here,” he says. “Let’s treat me like I’m the Sarge.”
Facing a crowd
Tony pulls out some marijuana while sitting on the couch. The clock is nearing 6 p.m and he hasn’t had a puff all day. He plans to when he gets in the car with Teddy.
They’re going to his granddaughter’s volleyball game. It’s senior night for the team, so there will be a big crowd on this October night. Crowds make Tony anxious now; it’s another symptom of Alzheimer’s disease.
Once inside the high school’s gymnasium, Tony and Teddy take a seat on the bleachers beside Josie. They cheer as his granddaughter, Aubree, and her parents are called on the court with the rest of the seniors. Teddy snaps a photo.
Michelle Raimer, Aubree’s mom, knows her father doesn’t do well with crowds anymore. She knows that after about 30 minutes, Tony will make an excuse to leave. He will need to walk the dog or feed the cat.
And she’s right.
Before the first match ends, Tony and Teddy say goodbye.
Tony is going home to walk Lucy, again.
Updated 9:05 a.m. Jan. 28, 2019 This story has been updated to correct the hours of operation of the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America’s helpline.
