To hear Georgene Sitzman tell it, meeting and marrying
her husband, Kenneth, was like a romance right out of a
movie.
"When we met, he was worldly, I was bashful,"
Georgene said. "He was pretty wily. He's an inventor;
he figured out how to do things. One day I came home, and
he had made a ceiling out of drywall in our garage and put
it in all by himself."
Kenneth, who will have been Georgene's husband for 50 years
in August, wasn't much for talking. But his brain was always
on, and he was a passionate husband, a man she could count
on for affection and unpredictability. They had one daughter,
many friends and plans to retire together. She never thought
the movie's final act would look like this.
In 1997, Kenneth, who has been on Third Phillips for almost
a year, started exhibiting symptoms of Alzheimer's disease.
An Army medic during the Korean War, Kenneth never talked
about his service much and spent most of his working years
as an expert in auto body repair. The couple lived in Lincoln
in October 1997, when an ice storm that killed power to
most of the city and coated trees and streets in a heavy
sheet of ice brought about somewhat of a breaking point.
"He had been having trouble doing small things, but
it wasn't too bad," she said. "During the storm,
you could hear the trees breaking, and it sounded like rifle
shots. The next morning, he couldn't walk and he couldn't
talk. I knew something was really wrong." Georgene
cared for Kenneth for more than six years, watching as her
mechanically inclined husband struggled to change light
bulbs and, eventually, became unable to care for himself.
She sought respite care for six days in 2003 and afterward
contacted the veterans home about committing Kenneth.
"They asked me how I took care of him all by myself,"
she said. "He had gotten pretty bad at that point."
The hardest part of Kenneth's illness, up until this point,
was leaving the ward after checking him in. While her husband
didn't have many of his faculties about him, Georgene said,
he knew he wanted to be with her, and staying on the ward
would mean she wouldn't be around.
"He ran after me saying, 'Don't leave me, don't leave
me,'" she said. "That's the hardest thing I've
ever had to do, and I've lost both my parents."
Still, Georgene makes it up to the ward several times a
week and recently celebrated Kenneth's birthday. Their 50th
anniversary will be bittersweet, she said, but she still
loves her husband very much and will continue to visit as
much as she can.
"It's your husband," she said. "You do what
you can."
Throughout his childhood, Pat Rall remembers taking more than one snowball to the shoulder from his dear old mom... Read more...
Being married to Kenneth Sitzman for almost 50 years has
been one of Georgene Sitzman's greatest adventure. Caring for
her husband once he developed Alzheimer's has been one of her
greatest challenges.