THE WORST DAY OF HER LIFE
It should have been a happy time. My formal education was over at last. I was a well regarded young professor, and had begun a very successful adjunct consulting work for multiple clients. The family could spend summers in California while I consulted, and we had frequent family trips and vacations. We were happy in our spiritual life - worshipping at Campbell in the summer while we were here in California, and actively involved with the Blacksburg congregation during the school year. We had no debts, other than what was a miniscule mortgage payment on our home in Virginia.

The only dark side was Karen's mom and her relationship to her. Gene was suffering from the emotional instability of Huntington's Disease (although we did not know it at the time) combined with the results of an abusive home life with an alcoholic stepfather. Finally, after Gene was visited by her mother and an uncle, the uncle observed physical symptoms and was convinced the "something was physically wrong with Gene." A visit to Loma Linda Medical Center resulted in the horrible diagnosis - Huntington's Disease.

I don't think any of us had any real idea what that meant at the time; but the horror gradually set it. A progressive, untreatable neuro-degenerative disease that frequently cripples emotionally, always cripples physically, and results in a long, lingering, isolated death. Worse, the disease is genetically transmitted by a 50-50 Mendellian gene. If you receive the gene from your parent, you WILL get the disease, and you have a 50-50 chance of passing it to each of you offspring.

At that time, there was no screening test. You simply had to wait until the disease sypmtoms showed up if one of your parents had the disease to know if you had inherited it. Most of the time, a person would already have passed the childbearing age before the sypmtoms would manifest themselves. We had already had our children.

To understand Karen's horror, you need to know just what her relationship to her mother had been. In Karen's mind, her mom had been a spoiled brat who transferred her housekeeping duties to Karen as soon as Karen was physically able to handle them. Her mother was jealous of the social life that Karen led; and her behaviour led to her mother and younger brother being banished from the naval base where the family lived to a neighboring city. There, she engaged in alcohol abuse and illicit affairs, resulting in a divorce.

With the diagnosis of HD and all of the implications of the disease, Karen feared that she would somehow follow in her mother's steps. At the same time, she felt sympathy for her mother's situation, and guilty for her previous need to be away from her mom as much as possible.

So here was this young mother with completely valid reasons for terror. She was watching her mom deteriorate before her eyes - feeling the guilt that she might have unfairly held her mom responsible for all of her behaviour - feeling guilty that she might have unknowingly already sentenced her own children to a similar fate, and her husband to a fate similar to her father's - and desperately seeking some promising answer to the horrible fate that had reared its ugly head; but finding absolutely none.

At the same time, she was still a vibrant, beautiful, capable, loving wife and mother. Over the next 13 years, she monitorred and managed her mother's care, managed our household, moved into and decorated a new home, taught Bible class for children and for women's ministry, and began the early decline of emotional control, while maintaining her grace and beauty.

So the worst day of her life was spent in terror of the future upon realizing the full implications of her mom's diagnosis.

Realize that in the past -of those who watched a parent go through HD, and then were forced to accept the reality that they were not only at risk, but had actually contracted the disease - fully half decided to end their own life rather than live through the disease process.

The right sad thing that Karen did was to deny the possibility of the disease, which ultimately gave her more years without the disease's influence than she could otherwise experience.

I do not say that everyone should deal with the disease this way; especially now that there is much promise of delaying the onset, treating the symptoms, or even its ultimate prevention and eradication. I only say that Karen's decision, as hard as it later seemed to us, probably gave us more healthy years with each other and with our children, and her service to the Lord.