Book captures couple’s life with Alzheimer’s

Last time I saw Ed Ackell, we were talking over beers after a round of golf as he prepared to ride off into retirement after a dozen years as presi dent of Virginia Commonwealth University.

It was a most pleasant day -- even though I'm a lousy golfer -- because Ackell had been a tough guy to get to know on the education beat, and spending a few hours with him at his favorite hobby had been an enjoyable revelation.

That was 1990.

A lot, of course, has happened in the ensuing 19 years, nothing more significant than this: Ackell was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1998, and he has been waging a grim battle ever since. In recent months, Ackell, who turns 84 later this month, has moved to a residential-care facility near his Southern California home.

"It was a very reluctant decision," said his wife, Judith Fox, a former Richmond business executive who tapped into her second career, as a fine art photographer, to chronicle Ackell's plight in a candid and powerful new book, "I Still Do: Loving and Living with Alzheimer's."

Fox is in Richmond today to talk and sign books at the Barnes & Noble at VCU Bookstore. She also will make a lunchtime appearance to sign books at the Alzheimer's Association Greater Richmond Chapter's Estes Express Conference on Dementia.

Fox's revealing photographs capture Ackell in all manner of daily living: somber, smiling, shirtless, sleeping. His eyes draw you in, as does the spare text complementing the images that read "like poetry," according to a quotation on the book jacket from retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, whose husband also has Alzheimer's.

Fox and Ackell talked about the pictures she was making, and the book they would become. But a book is not what Fox had in mind when she started photographing her husband as a way "to celebrate Ed and remember him."

"Photography for me is an act of love," Fox said in a phone interview from their home in La Jolla, a mile from the facility where Ackell now lives. "That's usually a very temporary kind of thing, but with Ed it was really another way of connecting with him. Ultimately, it was a gift he gave me, and I gave him."

Fox, who had operated Judith Fox Staffing Companies Inc., a temporary-services firm, was widowed and Ackell divorced when they married in 1995. She sold her company in 1996, and they lived for a while in Goochland County and spent some time at a home in Albemarle County before moving year-round to their place near San Diego. She had family there; he had worked at the University of Southern California before coming to VCU in the 1970s.

They also lived in a state of denial, even after Ackell was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. He didn't want people to know, for fear he would be treated differently. Fox didn't want to believe it could be happening to a well-rounded, talented man who had been a pilot in World War II and a surgeon, a university administrator and athlete. He sank two golfing holes-in-one after he was diagnosed.

But as Ackell's memory faded and the husband she knew began to leave, reality set in, they began in earnest what she describes as "a trip down a never-ending staircase." She also got out her camera.

Fox was told the idea of a book about Alzheimer's would be too depressing. Naturally, she didn't agree. She was willing to bare their private lives in a most public way in hopes others will find it educational, inspiring, even comforting. She wants to call attention to the disease that afflicts as many as 5 million Americans and to reach the caregivers who exist too often in desperate isolation.

And she wants to make the point that this is a story about love, no matter how much this relentless disease steals a person's ability to find the front door or to operate the coffee maker.

"He never forgets that he loves me," Fox writes, "and that I love him."
Contact Bill Lohmann at (804) 649-6639 or . Follow him at http:// twitter.com/wlohmann.