Three women brought the exact same Jell-O salad to the same church potluck last Easter, and none of them remembered they had brought it the year before, or the year before that, or the year before that.
It was the orange kind, the one with the can of mandarin oranges drained and folded in and the little marshmallows on top. June Henson made hers in a bundt mold. Carolyn Pickett made hers in a glass casserole dish. Annette Wadsworth made hers in a tupperware that used to be a different color before the dishwasher got to it. They set them down on the long folding table in the fellowship hall an
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Three women brought the exact same Jell-O salad to the same church potluck last Easter, and none of them remembered they had brought it the year before, or the year before that, or the year before that.
It was the orange kind, the one with the can of mandarin oranges drained and folded in and the little marshmallows on top. June Henson made hers in a bundt mold. Carolyn Pickett made hers in a glass casserole dish. Annette Wadsworth made hers in a tupperware that used to be a different color before the dishwasher got to it. They set them down on the long folding table in the fellowship hall and stepped back and looked at each other and didn't laugh the way they would have ten years ago. They just looked. And then they looked away.
I sat at the second table from the door with a green bean casserole in front of me and a paper plate I hadn't touched and watched the three of them not look at each other. I watched June straighten her napkin and Carolyn cross her arms and Annette pick a piece of lint off her sleeve that wasn't there. And I thought about the year before, when there had been two identical Jell-O salads and the women had laughed about it and decided it was a sign that they had been friends too long. And the year before that, when there had been one. And the year before that, when there had been one. And the year before that, when there had been one. The same recipe, the same dish, the same little can of mandarin oranges on top. Set down on the same table in the same fellowship hall by women who had forgotten they had ever set it down before.
I am going to tell you why I went home from that potluck and threw my husband Henry's prescription bottles into the kitchen trash, the small one under the sink, not the big one in the garage, because I wanted to be sure I had meant to do it.
I am going to tell you what I learned in the eight months after that Easter Sunday. I am going to tell you what I saw in my own husband, and in the husbands of seven of my closest friends, and what one of those husbands said to his wife at his own granddaughter's birthday party that I will not write down here because it isn't mine to write down, but which is the reason I started looking for an answer instead of waiting for one.
I am Beverly. I am sixty-nine years old. I have been married to Henry for forty-seven years. We live in Macon, Georgia, in a brick ranch house on a street where most of the women on the block have outlived their husbands by ten or twelve years. We have been members of Wesley Memorial Methodist Church since 1981. I taught third-grade Sunday school for twenty-two of those years. Henry was a retired insurance adjuster who used to put together the church newsletter on his own initiative because nobody else would do it, and he did the bulletin board in the fellowship hall every season, the construction-paper letters and the borders and the little inspirational quotes he found in a book his mother gave him in 1962.
Used to. That is the word I want you to notice. Used to.
The Henry who put together the newsletter is the Henry who took atorvastatin every morning with a glass of water for ten years and got his bloodwork done every six months and was told by every cardiologist and every primary care physician and every nurse practitioner he ever saw that his numbers looked excellent. His LDL was down to 74. His total cholesterol was 162. His HDL was respectable. Everybody was pleased. Everybody clapped him on the back. Everybody said keep doing what you're doing, Henry, you're a model patient.
The Henry who sits in the second pew on the left side of the sanctuary now and stares at his hands during the offertory is also the Henry who took atorvastatin every morning for ten years. They are the same man. Nobody told us they could be the same man. Nobody warned us that one could become the other while the numbers stayed beautiful on the paper.
I am not a doctor. I am a Methodist church lady from Macon, Georgia, who taught third grade Sunday school for twenty-two years and noticed things. That is all the authority I have, and that is what I am going to use, because I am the woman in the second pew on the left who has been watching Henry for forty-seven years, and I am also the woman who has been sitting next to June Henson and Carolyn Pickett and Annette Wadsworth and Mary Lou Tomlinson and Susan Brittain and Frances Ledbetter and Eileen Carmichael at the Tuesday morning Bible study for thirty-one years, and I have watched their husbands too. Seven husbands. Seven of them on the same family of drugs. Seven of them on the same slow walk down the same hallway. And I will not let it happen to mine without saying something.
I have been writing this letter in my head since the day after that Easter potluck. I am writing it down now because if you are sitting where I was sitting — at a potluck table, or in a pew, or across from your husband at the kitchen table while he tries to remember the name of the boy who delivered your paper for six years — you may not have a lot of time, and the women I love took too long to say it out loud, and I am not going to.
You have to understand what Henry was before I can tell you what he became, because the slowness of the change is the whole story. If he had gone to sleep on Tuesday night the way he had always been and woken up on Wednesday morning the way he is now, we would have called every hospital in middle Georgia. But it did not happen that way. It happened the way a creek dries up. You drive past it every day. The water is lower. The water is lower. The water is lower. And then one morning the creek bed is dry and you think to yourself I cannot remember the last time I saw water in there, and you cannot, because there was never a day. There were only a thousand days.
Henry Lewis Pickering was born in Forsyth, Georgia, in 1953, the oldest of four. His father ran a feed store. His mother taught piano. Henry was the boy who organized the other boys at recess into baseball teams and wrote down the batting orders on the back of a Big Chief tablet. He went to Mercer University and studied business and came home and married me in 1979 and went to work for Allstate as an adjuster, which is the job he held for thirty-six years until he retired in 2014 with a gold watch he keeps in a drawer because he doesn't like to wear it.
Henry was the man who balanced the checkbook the same day the statement came in the mail. Henry was the man who knew the name of every neighbor on our street and the names of their children and the names of their dogs. Henry was the man who would stop at a stranger's car if they were on the shoulder of the road and ask if they needed help and sit with them for an hour if they did. Henry was the man who could tell you the score of every Georgia Bulldogs game from 1972 to 2012, who won, who lost, what the weather was, what we ate while we watched it.
Henry was the man who, when our daughter Margaret was born and we were terrified, sat in the rocking chair at three in the morning and read her the entire book of Genesis out loud because he could not think of anything else to do and he wanted her to hear his voice. He read it through twice. Margaret is forty-three now and lives in Charlotte and she still has that copy of Genesis on her bookshelf.
Henry was the man who put together the church newsletter every single month for nineteen years, the four-page newsletter with the announcements and the prayer list and the little column on the back called Henry's Corner that he started without asking anybody if they wanted it and that nobody ever told him to stop. He wrote about the seasons and the hymns and the little stories from his own life that he thought might bear on a passage from scripture, and the older members of the congregation told me they read his column before they read anything else.
Henry was the man who recited the Apostles' Creed from memory every Sunday for sixty-one years, because we are Methodists and we say it together, and he had been saying it since he was twelve years old, and he could say it in his sleep, and he had said it in his sleep, because I had heard him do it during a nap on the back porch in 1987 when he was dreaming about something I never did learn what.
That is the Henry you have to know before I tell you about the Henry who could not remember the words that morning.
I am going to tell you what I noticed, and I am going to tell it in order, the way I wrote it down in the green spiral notebook I keep in the drawer next to the refrigerator. I started writing it down in 2017, three years after Henry's first prescription, because I had already begun to notice things and I did not trust my memory to hold them. I did not yet know I was building a case. I thought I was just being careful.
I want to be honest about the years before I started writing, too, because I was already watching even when I did not know I was watching. A wife watches. A wife of forty-seven years watches the way you watch the weather out of a window you have been looking out of for half a century. You don't have to try. You see it.
2014. Henry retires from Allstate in March. The party at the office is in the conference room and they have a cake that says Henry Pickering Thirty-Six Years in blue icing. He gives a little speech and he is fine. He is more than fine. He is funny. He tells the story about the claim he handled in 1989 where the man swore his car had been hit by a deer and the deer turned out to be his neighbor's mailbox, and everybody laughs, and they always laugh at that story because it is a good story and Henry tells it well.
In September of 2014 he goes for his physical and his cholesterol comes back at 247. The doctor, Dr. Mahmoud, who has been Henry's doctor since 2008, says it is time to start atorvastatin. Henry says all right. Henry has never been the kind of man who fights the doctor. Henry takes the prescription and he fills it at the CVS on Vineville Avenue and he starts taking it the next morning with his coffee.
Nothing changes that I can see. He is the same Henry. He puts up the bulletin board for the fall, which is the one with the construction-paper cornstalks and the pumpkins. He writes Henry's Corner for the October newsletter, about a hymn called In the Garden, which his mother used to sing while she was peeling apples.
2015. His cholesterol comes back at 184. Dr. Mahmoud is pleased. Henry is pleased. We go to lunch at the Cracker Barrel on Eisenhower Parkway after the appointment and Henry orders the meatloaf and tells me his numbers are looking good.
I will tell you what I noticed in 2015. It was small. I noticed that Henry started reading the newspaper later in the morning. He had always read it with his coffee before I came down. Starting in maybe May or June of that year I would come down and the paper would still be on the front step and Henry would be sitting at the kitchen table looking at the wall. He would go get the paper when I asked him to, and he would read it then, but he was not getting up and getting it the way he had for forty years. I did not say anything. I thought he was enjoying his retirement. I thought he had earned a slower morning.
2016. His cholesterol comes back at 156. Dr. Mahmoud says excellent. Henry comes home and tells me his numbers are excellent.
In 2016, Henry forgot Margaret's birthday. Margaret's birthday is October the eleventh. It has been October the eleventh for forty-three years. Henry has never forgotten it. He has always called her at seven in the morning her time, which is six our time, and sung her the first verse of Happy Birthday and then said something like there's more where that came from but I'll spare you. On October the eleventh, 2016, he came down to breakfast at eight thirty and ate his oatmeal and I said Henry did you call Margaret and he looked at me. He looked at me for a long moment and then he said Margaret. And then he said oh my God, and he got up and called her, and he was on the phone with her for forty-five minutes apologizing.
He came back into the kitchen and he was upset and he said Beverly I don't know what is wrong with me. I said it is just one birthday Henry. He said no I have been forgetting things. I said what kind of things. He could not tell me what kind of things. He just sat at the table and looked at his hands.
I want you to remember that — Henry sitting at the table and looking at his hands. You will see him sitting at the table and looking at his hands a lot in this letter. It became the posture of him in those years. A man looking down at his own hands as if they belonged to somebody else and he was trying to figure out what they were doing on the end of his arms.
2017. This is the year I started writing things down. I bought the green spiral notebook at the Walmart on Zebulon Road, the kind with the perforated edges. I put it in the drawer next to the refrigerator under the takeout menus we never used. I started writing the date and one or two lines and not much more. The first entry is March 14, 2017. It says: Henry could not remember Pastor Roy's name today at the church anniversary luncheon. I had to lean over and say it. He was embarrassed. He said the medication makes me foggy. He said it as if he had read it somewhere.
His cholesterol that year is 142. Dr. Mahmoud is so pleased he writes it down on a little post-it note and gives it to Henry.
In 2017 we go to Hilton Head for our anniversary, the way we go every year, and Henry forgets where he parked the rental car at the grocery store. We are in the parking lot for forty minutes. He blames the parking lot. He says these new parking lots all look the same. The parking lot is the same parking lot we have been going to every July for nine years. I do not say that.
In 2017, June Henson tells me at Tuesday Bible study that her husband Doug has started getting up in the middle of the night and standing in the kitchen and not knowing why he got up. She tells it like it's funny. We laugh because that is what you do. Doug is sixty-eight. Doug has been on simvastatin since 2010.
2018. This is the year Henry stops doing the church newsletter. He does not announce it. He does not say I am stepping down. He just does not produce the May newsletter. Pastor Connie calls and asks if everything is all right and Henry says oh I just thought it was time to let somebody else have a turn. Pastor Connie says that is fine, and Henry sits in his recliner for the rest of the afternoon and stares at the television, which is showing a golf tournament he is not watching. I sit at the kitchen table and I write in the green notebook: Henry has given up the newsletter. He did not give it up. It gave him up.
His bloodwork that year is the best it has ever been. His LDL is 89. His total cholesterol is 148. Dr. Mahmoud says he has never seen a better response to atorvastatin. He says Henry could be in a brochure. Henry tells the story at supper and we both laugh and I write down the word brochure in the green notebook and underline it twice because I cannot say why.
In 2018, Carolyn Pickett's husband Earl falls in the bathroom and breaks his hip. Earl is seventy-one. Earl has been on atorvastatin since 2009. The orthopedic surgeon tells Carolyn it was a clean break, that he will be back on his feet in eight weeks, and Carolyn nods and says thank you and writes the discharge instructions down in her own little notebook because Earl can no longer be trusted to remember a discharge instruction.
I notice. I write it down. I do not yet know what I am noticing. I just know that I am writing down the same kinds of things about Henry that Carolyn is telling me about Earl, and that we are not the only ones.
2019. Henry forgets which Sunday the potluck is. The potluck is the second Sunday of every month. It has been the second Sunday of every month since I joined Wesley Memorial in 1981. Henry has been making his three-bean salad for the potluck for thirty-seven years. On the second Sunday of February 2019 we come home from church and Henry says are we going back tonight for the potluck and I say Henry the potluck was today. We had it. We just came from it. You brought your three-bean salad. He looks at me and he says oh. He looks at me for a long moment. He says oh I must have been confused.
He goes into the bedroom and closes the door and does not come out for two hours.
His cholesterol in 2019 is 138. Dr. Mahmoud is pleased.
This is also the year Henry sits in the wrong pew. We have sat in the second pew on the left for thirty-eight years. On a Sunday in August he walks past it and sits down in the fourth pew on the right next to the Vinings, who are nice but who are not us. I sit down beside him. I do not say anything. He stays there for the whole service. Afterward in the parking lot he says I don't know why I did that. I say it is fine. I say nobody noticed. They had noticed.
In 2019, Annette Wadsworth's husband Earl — there are two Earls in our circle, I should have mentioned that, Carolyn's Earl and Annette's Earl, Annette's Earl is also seventy-something and also on a statin — sets the microwave to forty minutes instead of four to reheat his coffee. Annette finds him standing in the kitchen looking at the microwave while smoke comes out of it. Annette tells me at Bible study on Tuesday. She is laughing about it. I am laughing about it. We are all laughing about it because it is funny in a way and because if we did not laugh we would have to admit what was happening.
I write in the green notebook: Two Earls, one Henry, one Doug. All four on a statin. All four something is wrong.
2020. The world shuts down. Church goes online. Henry watches the service on the iPad and then forgets we watched it and asks me on Sunday afternoon when church is. I have to tell him three times some Sundays. We do not see the friends from Bible study in person for fourteen months. The decline I would have watched in real time at Tuesday morning Bible study, I watch by phone instead.
June Henson calls me in May to tell me Doug has stopped reading. Doug had read three books a week his entire life. He had been a high school history teacher for thirty years. Doug had not opened a book since March, June tells me. June is crying on the phone. She says I asked him about it and he said the words don't stay together anymore. He said it just like that. The words don't stay together anymore.
I write that in the green notebook. The words don't stay together anymore. I underline it.
Henry's cholesterol in 2020 is 131. Dr. Mahmoud sends a portal message that says wonderful work Henry keep it up.
2021. This is the year I start to be afraid. Not of one thing. Not of a heart attack. Not of a stroke. I am afraid in a way I have never been afraid before because what I am watching does not have a name. It does not have a name in the doctor's office. It does not have a name on the bloodwork. It does not have a name on the prescription bottle. It has only a shape, and the shape is Henry sitting at the kitchen table looking at his hands, and Doug Henson standing in the kitchen in the middle of the night, and Earl Pickett tipping over in the bathroom, and Earl Wadsworth setting the microwave to forty minutes. The shape has no name and it is in eight houses I can name without thinking.
In June of 2021 I go with Henry to his appointment. I have not gone with him before. Henry has always gone alone because he is a grown man and he can talk to his own doctor. I go because I have decided I need to say something. I sit in the chair next to Henry's chair and I wait until Dr. Mahmoud is done congratulating Henry on his cholesterol numbers and I clear my throat.
I say, Dr. Mahmoud, can I ask you something. He says of course Mrs. Pickering. I say, Henry has not been himself for several years. He forgets things. He forgets where he parks the car. He forgot our daughter's birthday. He forgot which Sunday the potluck is. He sat in the wrong pew at church. He used to do the newsletter and now he won't go near it. He sits at the table and looks at his hands for hours. Is there anything that could be causing this. Is there something we should be looking at.
Dr. Mahmoud looks at me. He looks at Henry. He looks at the screen with Henry's bloodwork on it. He says, Mrs. Pickering, your husband is seventy years old. He says, your husband's numbers are some of the best I see in my whole practice. He says, some of what you are describing is completely normal. He says, normal aging. He says, my own father is the same way. He says, I understand it is hard to watch, and we can talk about whether a cognitive evaluation would be useful at some point, but I would not be worried about anything related to his cardiovascular health. He says, the medication is doing exactly what we want it to do.
I say thank you. I do not say anything else. Henry says thank you. We go home. I sit at the kitchen table and I do not write anything in the green notebook for a week because I am too angry. I am not angry at Dr. Mahmoud, exactly. I am angry that I sat there and said what I came to say and was told it was normal aging. Doug Henson saying the words don't stay together anymore is not normal aging. Earl Wadsworth setting the microwave to forty minutes is not normal aging. Henry sitting in the wrong pew is not normal aging. Eight men in one congregation on the same family of drugs all walking down the same hallway at the same pace is not normal aging. It is a pattern. A pattern has a cause. I did not yet know the cause but I knew it had one.
Henry's cholesterol in 2021 is 128. He is the model patient.
2022. Mary Lou Tomlinson's husband Bob — I have not mentioned Bob until now because Bob was always the quiet one, but Bob is on a statin too, Bob has been on a statin since 2011 — Mary Lou tells me at Bible study in March that Bob has started asking her the same question every fifteen minutes. The question is always different. The same question gets asked the same number of times. Mary Lou says it is like a clock. She says it is like a clock that resets and starts the same hour over and over. Mary Lou is crying. We are sitting in the Bible study room at the church and we are supposed to be discussing the book of Ruth and Mary Lou is crying about Bob.
I look around the table. Six of us are at Bible study that morning. Five of us have a husband. Five of us have a husband on a statin. Five of us have a husband who is not the man we married.
I do not yet have the words. I have the shape.
Henry sits in the kitchen and stares at the toaster in 2022 for what I time to be eleven minutes. He is not waiting for the toast. He has not put toast in the toaster. He is just looking at it. When I ask him what he is doing he says oh I was just thinking. He says it the way a child says it. I do not press. I do not ever press. I write it in the green notebook and I close the notebook and I go and start the dishes.
His cholesterol in 2022 is 124. Dr. Mahmoud is delighted.
2023. Henry loses his place in the hymnal. He has lost his place in the hymnal before — everybody loses their place in the hymnal sometimes, that is what the hymnal is for — but in 2023 he begins to lose his place every Sunday, and not just once a Sunday, four and five times. He turns to the wrong page. He stares at the page. He looks at me. I lean over and I find the right page for him. He nods and looks at the page and then he looks away from it.
In 2023, Frances Ledbetter's husband Tom — Tom has been on rosuvastatin since 2012 — wanders out of the house in his pajamas at four in the morning and walks to the convenience store on Pio Nono Avenue and the clerk calls Frances because Tom does not know how to get home. Tom had been a Delta pilot. Tom had landed planes in fog and wind and over and over and over again for thirty-five years. Tom could not find his way home from the convenience store seven blocks away.
I write in the green notebook: They are not aging. They are being taken from us.
His cholesterol in 2023 is 119. Dr. Mahmoud says Henry is a textbook case.
In November of 2023, Eileen Carmichael's husband Walter — Walter has been on simvastatin for twelve years — passes away in his sleep. Walter was seventy-four. The death certificate says natural causes. Eileen says to me at the visitation that Walter had not known her name for the last two months. She says it standing next to the casket and her hand is on the casket and she is not looking at me. She says he kept calling me Ma'am, Beverly. He kept calling me Ma'am.
I write in the green notebook: Walter. Then I close it. I do not write anything else for the rest of November.
2024. Easter Sunday. Easter is on March the thirty-first that year. We go to the early service because Henry sleeps better if we go early. The fellowship hall is set up for the potluck. The long folding tables are lined up against the wall and the women have already started bringing in the dishes. Annette walks in with her tupperware. Carolyn walks in with her casserole dish. June walks in with her bundt mold. They set them down in a row and they look at each other and they don't laugh.
I sit at the second table from the door with my green bean casserole and Henry sits next to me and Henry is looking at his hands. I am looking at the Jell-O salads.
I am looking at the Jell-O salads and I am thinking about the year before, when there had been two of them and we had laughed, and the year before that, when there had been one of them and June had been so proud, and I am thinking about how many Easters I have sat at this table watching the women who I have known longer than I have known my own daughter and how many of those Easters I have watched their husbands not be there or be there but not be there, and I am thinking about my own husband next to me looking at his hands, and I am thinking about Dr. Mahmoud saying normal aging, and I am thinking about Eileen Carmichael with her hand on Walter's casket saying he kept calling me Ma'am, and I am thinking about the pattern, the shape with no name, and the eight families in eight houses in middle Georgia all walking down the same hallway, and I do not eat the green bean casserole and I do not eat the Jell-O salad and I get up and I tell Henry I am going home early and I get the keys and I drive home.
When I get home I open the medicine cabinet and I take out Henry's bottle of atorvastatin and I look at it for a long time and I do not throw it out. I am not yet ready to throw it out. But I sit at the kitchen table with the bottle in front of me and I get out the green notebook and I write on a fresh page: I am going to find out what this is. I owe it to him. I owe it to all of them.
That is where this letter actually begins.
I want to tell you about the Sunday that came two weeks after the Easter potluck, because that is the Sunday I stopped looking for a reason and started looking for an answer.
It was the second Sunday of April. The sanctuary at Wesley Memorial seats about three hundred people and there are usually two hundred and twenty there on a Sunday morning, give or take depending on the weather and the football schedule. The service order is the same every week. We sing two hymns. We hear the announcements. We have the children's moment. We say the Apostles' Creed. We have the scripture reading. We have the sermon. We have the offering. We have the communion if it is communion Sunday. We have the closing hymn. We have the benediction. Henry has been doing this exact order of service for sixty-one years.
The Apostles' Creed comes after the second hymn. We stand. The congregation says it together. The pastor leads us off and we say the words.
I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary.
Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended into hell. The third day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty.
From thence he shall come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.
That is the Apostles' Creed. There are a hundred and ten words in it. Henry has known those words since he was twelve years old. Henry has said those words something like three thousand times in his life. Henry can say those words the way you can say your own name.
On the second Sunday of April, 2024, Henry stood up next to me in the second pew on the left and opened his hymnal because we keep the words of the creed on the inside cover of the hymnal even though nobody needs them, and he looked at the page, and the congregation started to say the words, and Henry did not say them.
He opened his mouth.
He did not say anything.
The congregation said I believe in God the Father almighty and Henry did not say anything. The congregation said creator of heaven and earth and Henry did not say anything. I looked at Henry from the side of my eye, the way you do in church when you are not supposed to be looking at anyone, and Henry was standing there with his hymnal open and his mouth open and his eyes on the page and nothing was coming out. The congregation kept going. The congregation said I believe in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord and Henry did not say anything. The congregation said suffered under Pontius Pilate was crucified died and was buried and Henry did not say anything.
I want you to understand what I did, because I am ashamed of it and I am not ashamed of it at the same time. I did not turn to him. I did not whisper the words to him. I did not put my hand on his arm. I did what a Methodist church lady from Macon, Georgia, does in church when her husband is standing next to her unable to speak: I kept my face perfectly still and I said the words myself in my normal voice at my normal volume so that the people in the pew behind us would think Henry was saying them too. I said the entire Apostles' Creed in Henry's voice and my voice at the same time and I did not look at him until we said amen.
When I looked at him after amen, he was still standing. He was looking at the hymnal. He had not closed it. The rest of the congregation had sat down. He was the only person in the sanctuary still standing and I had to put my hand on his elbow and guide him down to the pew.
He sat down. He looked at the hymnal in his hands. He looked at me. He looked at the hymnal again. He did not say anything for the rest of the service.
After the benediction we filed out the back of the sanctuary the way we always do. Henry shook the pastor's hand. He said good sermon, Pastor Connie. He always said that. He said it even when the sermon had been about something he did not particularly agree with. He said it as if his mouth had a small drawer in it where the words good sermon Pastor Connie were kept and the drawer opened automatically when he saw the pastor's hand.
We walked out to the parking lot. Our car was in the same spot it had been in for forty-three years. Henry walked toward it and I walked beside him and I did not say anything because I did not know what to say.
When we got to the car, Henry stopped. He turned to me. He said, Beverly, are we going to lunch with Pastor Roy.
Pastor Roy died in 2009.
I want to tell you what I did. I said, no honey, not today. I said it in the same voice I would have used to tell him that the cleaners had not finished his suit. I opened the car door and I helped him in and I closed the door and I walked around to the driver's side and I got in and I put the key in the ignition and I did not start the car for a minute. I just sat there with my hands on the steering wheel.
Then I drove us home. Henry looked out the window. I did not say anything. He did not say anything.
When we got home I made him a sandwich and I gave him a glass of iced tea and I told him he should take a nap. He took the nap. He slept for two hours. While he was sleeping I sat at the kitchen table and I took out the green notebook and I did not write anything for a long time. Then I wrote: He could not say the creed today. He asked about lunch with Pastor Roy in the parking lot. I am going to find out what this is. I am going to find it this week. I do not care what I have to do.
I closed the notebook.
I did not cry.
I am not a woman who cries. I have cried twice in my adult life, once at my mother's funeral and once when Margaret was born, and I would not cry a third time over something I could do something about.
That afternoon, while Henry was still sleeping, I got out my laptop and I started looking.
You have to understand that I am not a researcher. I am a Methodist church lady from Macon, Georgia, who used the internet for emails to my daughter and Facebook posts about the grandchildren and looking up recipes for the church cookbook. I had not before that afternoon ever tried to find out anything serious on the internet. I did not know how to do it. I knew that there was a search box and I knew that you put things in it and pressed enter.
I sat at the kitchen table with the laptop and I put in the search box: husband on cholesterol medicine forgetting things.
I will not bore you with everything I read. I will tell you what I found that mattered, in the order I found it.
The first thing I found was a forum. It was called something like Statin Side Effects Survivor Forum, I do not remember exactly. It was the kind of forum where people post about their experiences and other people post back. I read for three hours. I read posts from women who sounded exactly like me. Women whose husbands had been on statins for ten or fifteen years. Women whose husbands' numbers were excellent. Women whose husbands could no longer remember the names of their own grandchildren. Women whose husbands had stopped reading, stopped driving, stopped recognizing the rooms of their own houses. Women who had been told by every doctor they had ever seen that this was normal aging, that the medication was working, that the numbers proved it.
I read until the laptop's battery ran down. I plugged it in. I kept reading.
I found my way to a Facebook group. It was a private group, you had to ask to join, I asked to join and they let me in twenty minutes later. The group was called something with the word adiponectin in it, which is a word I had never heard before in my life. I will tell you about adiponectin in a minute.
I found a book. The book was written by a doctor who had retired from a cardiology practice in Boston and who had spent the last fifteen years of his career trying to understand why patients with excellent numbers were getting worse. I bought the book on Amazon and it arrived on Wednesday. I read it in two days. I made notes in the margins with a pencil. I underlined things.
I will tell you the part I underlined the most because it is what I want to tell you.
There is a hormone in the human body called adiponectin. It is made by your fat cells. It does a lot of things but the thing that matters for this story is that it controls how your body handles fats. It tells the fats where to go. It tells the fats not to stick to the inside of your arteries. It tells your liver how to break the fats down. It tells your muscles how to use the fats for energy.
When adiponectin is at a healthy level, your arteries can handle a lot of fat without the fat sticking to them. When adiponectin is low, even a small amount of fat can stick to the inside of your arteries and build up there, slowly, over years.
Statins lower your LDL number. That is the number the doctor is looking at. That is the number the doctor congratulates you on. But statins, in some people — not in everybody, but in some people, and this is where it gets important — statins also suppress the production of adiponectin.
That means that the LDL number on the page can be beautiful. It can be 74. It can be 128. It can be anything. And meanwhile the adiponectin in your body has been suppressed for ten years and the small amounts of fat in your bloodstream have been sticking to your artery walls anyway, because the hormone that was supposed to tell them not to has been turned down. And the fat has been building up in the arteries that feed your brain. And the brain has been getting less and less blood. And the man you have been married to for forty-seven years has been slowly losing the ability to recite the Apostles' Creed.
The number the doctor has been so proud of, as I put it later when I tried to explain this to my friends, is the wrong thing to be measuring.
I want to give you the analogy I came up with, because I am a woman who has cooked supper every night for forty-seven years and I think in terms of pots and pans. Imagine you have a pot on the stove. You are cooking something in it. The doctor has been polishing the outside of the pot for ten years. The outside of the pot is gleaming. It looks beautiful. The doctor takes a picture of the outside of the pot every six months and shows you the picture and says look how clean this pot is. Meanwhile, inside the pot, the food has been burning for ten years. The bottom of the pot is black. The food is ruined. The doctor has never looked inside the pot. The doctor has been measuring the wrong thing.
That is what I learned in that first week of reading. The doctor had been measuring the wrong thing for ten years on Henry, and on Doug, and on both Earls, and on Bob Tomlinson, and on Tom Ledbetter, and on Walter Carmichael, who was dead now and had been calling Eileen Ma'am at the end.
I want to be careful here. I am not telling you the statin is wrong. I am not telling you to throw out your husband's medicine, even though I threw out Henry's, and I will tell you about that in a minute. I am telling you that the number on the paper is not the whole story. I am telling you that there is a hormone in your husband's body that nobody is measuring and that may be the thing that is taking him from you. I am telling you what I read and what I came to believe and what changed everything for our family.
I read more. I read about populations in Okinawa, in Japan, where the men live to be ninety and a hundred and they still know who their wives are and they still recognize their own children. I read that those men drink oolong tea every day of their lives, two and three cups, starting in their twenties and going until the day they die. I read that the polyphenols in oolong tea — there is a polyphenol called EGCG, and there are polyphenols called theaflavins, and there is a whole family of them — that the polyphenols in oolong tea have been studied for their ability to support healthy levels of that hormone, adiponectin, that nobody had ever measured in Henry.
I read about a tea called PiPi Tea. I had never heard of it. It was an oolong tea from China, processed in the whole-leaf way, which the doctor's book said preserved the active compounds — the EGCG, the theaflavins, the catechins, the whole family — in a way that mass-produced tea did not. The book said that most teas lose their potency in processing. The book said this one didn't.
PiPi Tea was studied. There was research. There were people taking it and seeing changes in their bloodwork and in their lives. There was a website. There was an order page. There was a ninety-day money-back guarantee, which I want you to remember because we will come back to it. The website was https://shop.pipitea.com/ppch/sp and I want you to write it down somewhere because if you are anything like me you will want to find it again later.
I sat at the kitchen table with the green notebook open in front of me and the book open beside it and the laptop screen showing the order page for PiPi Tea, and I thought about Henry asleep in the bedroom, and I thought about the Apostles' Creed, and I thought about Walter Carmichael in his casket, and I thought about the three identical Jell-O salads, and I thought about Eileen Carmichael saying he kept calling me Ma'am, Beverly, and I picked up the laptop and I ordered the tea.
I want to tell you something about that moment. I am a careful woman with money. I am the daughter of a Depression-era family. I do not buy things I do not understand and I do not order things from the internet without thinking about it for a week. I had never in my life ordered a supplement or a vitamin or a health product from a website. I would not have done it then for a vitamin or a supplement. I did it because what I had found was not a supplement. It was tea. I understood tea. My mother had made tea. My grandmother had made tea. I had been pouring tea for the church coffee hour for forty years.
It was tea.
That was the thing that let me click the button. It was a tea that for some reason nobody had ever told us about, that the populations who drank it for a hundred years had been living long lives without losing their minds, that the doctor in Boston who had spent his retirement studying why patients with good numbers were getting bad lives had written about in his book, and that had a ninety-day money-back guarantee from a company that I could send it back to if it did not do anything.
I ordered enough for six months. It came on Friday.
That weekend, while Henry was sleeping on Saturday afternoon, I took the bottle of atorvastatin out of the medicine cabinet and I put it in the small trash can under the kitchen sink. I want to be honest. I did not throw it out. I put it in the trash. I left it in the trash for two hours while I sat at the kitchen table and looked at the trash can. Then I took it out of the trash and I put it back in the medicine cabinet. Then I sat at the table for another hour. Then I took it out of the medicine cabinet and I put it in the trash can in the garage, the big one, where I could not see it. Then I went back inside.
I did not stop Henry's medication that day. I did not stop it that month. I want to be clear about that, because I do not want any wife reading this letter to take her husband off his medication because of me. That is between her and her husband and her doctor.
What I did was start the tea. I brewed Henry a cup the next morning. I gave it to him with his breakfast. He drank it. He said it was good. I gave him another cup that afternoon. He drank that one too. He did not ask what it was. He has trusted me on what he ate and drank for forty-seven years.
I started giving him two cups a day. Every day. Without fail. I made it the way the directions on the bag said to make it. I did not tell him why. I did not tell anyone why. I just gave him the tea.
The website is https://shop.pipitea.com/ppch/sp if you have not written it down yet. The guarantee is 90-day money-back. I will keep telling you because I told myself.
Week one. Nothing. He drank the tea. I watched him. I wrote in the green notebook every day. Nothing was different. I had not expected anything to be different in the first week but I had hoped a little bit, the way you do, and there was nothing. He still looked at his hands at the kitchen table. He still asked me three times when church was. He still lost his place in the hymnal at the Wednesday night Bible study.
Week two. Something. I will tell you exactly what. We were eating supper on a Thursday night and Henry had his fork in his hand and he stopped eating and he looked at me and he said, Beverly, what did the Hancocks name their new dog. The Hancocks live across the street. They had gotten a new dog three weeks before. The dog's name was Cooper. Henry had asked me the dog's name maybe twenty times in the three weeks since the Hancocks got the dog. He had never remembered it. On that Thursday night in the second week of the tea, he asked me what the dog was named, and I said Cooper, and he said Cooper, that's right, Cooper. And then he said the funny thing about that name is that the Hancocks had a Cooper twelve years ago, didn't they.
They had. The Hancocks had had a beagle named Cooper from about 2010 to 2017 when it died. Henry had not mentioned the first Cooper since about 2018. He had not mentioned anything from twelve years ago in I cannot tell you how long.
I wrote in the green notebook: He remembered the first Cooper. He remembered both the first Cooper and the second Cooper. He told me about it without my asking.
I did not say anything to him about it. I did not want him to know I had noticed.
Week three. He read the newspaper before I came down. He had not done that since 2015. He had gone out and gotten the paper off the front step and brought it in and made his coffee and was reading the front page when I came down the stairs. He looked up and he said Beverly the Bulldogs lost. I said when. He said yesterday. He said the score and the name of the quarterback who had thrown the interception. He said it the way he would have said it in 2008.
I sat down across from him and I drank my coffee and I did not say anything.
Week four. He started writing again. I do not mean he wrote a newsletter. I mean he sat at the kitchen table with a yellow legal pad and a pen and he wrote things. He wrote lists. He wrote names. He wrote a paragraph about something he had remembered about his mother. He left the yellow legal pad on the kitchen counter and I read it when he was not in the room. The paragraph about his mother was three sentences long and it was about the way she sang In the Garden while she was peeling apples. It was the same hymn he had written about in the October newsletter in 2014, the last full newsletter he ever did. He did not know he had written about it before. But he had remembered her, and he had remembered the hymn, and he had written it down.
I closed the legal pad and I went into the bathroom and I sat on the edge of the bathtub and I put my face in my hands for a long time.
Week five. Carolyn Pickett called me on a Tuesday afternoon. She said Beverly what is going on with you. I said what do you mean. She said you have been quiet at Bible study. You have been smiling. You are up to something. I said I am not up to anything. She said Beverly Pickering I have known you since 1981 and you are up to something. I told her about the tea. I told her about the book. I told her about the adiponectin. I told her about the website. I gave her the address: https://shop.pipitea.com/ppch/sp. I told her the guarantee was ninety days. I told her she should think about it.
She ordered it that night. She started giving it to Earl on Saturday morning.
I called June Henson the next day and I told her the same thing. I told her about Doug. I told her about the tea. June ordered it that afternoon.
Week six. Henry stood up in church on Sunday and recited the Apostles' Creed.
I want to tell you what that was like. We had gone to the early service. The fellowship hall was set up for coffee afterward. We stood for the creed. The congregation began. Henry opened his hymnal but he did not look at it. He started saying the words. I heard him. I heard his voice next to me in the pew, the same voice that had said those words a thousand Sundays, the same voice that had sung Margaret to sleep with Genesis at three in the morning in 1982, the same voice that had told the story about the deer and the mailbox at his retirement party in 2014. He said the words. All of them. He said I believe in God the Father almighty creator of heaven and earth, and he said I believe in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, and he kept going. He said amen at the end with the rest of the congregation. He sat down. He did not say anything to me about it. I do not think he knew that anything had happened.
I held my face still the way I had held it still on the morning he could not say the words. I did not cry. I do not cry. I told you that.
After the service I went to the bathroom and I stood in the stall and I held my hand over my mouth for two minutes because I did not trust myself to be quiet.
Week seven. Earl Pickett walked down to the mailbox by himself for the first time in nine months. Carolyn called me. She was crying. She said Beverly he just got up and put on his shoes and walked to the mailbox and came back in and asked me if there was any mail. He had not done that since the winter. He had been having Carolyn bring the mail in. Just like that, Carolyn said. Just like the old Earl.
Week eight. Doug Henson read a book. The whole book. It was a paperback mystery. He read it in three days. June called me on a Sunday afternoon and said he is reading. He is reading the second one already. He told me the words are staying together again. He told me that, Beverly. He said the words are staying together.
I sat at the kitchen table with the phone to my ear and I wrote in the green notebook: The words are staying together. I underlined it twice.
Week ten. Henry's bloodwork. We went to Dr. Mahmoud. Henry had been off the atorvastatin for about six weeks at this point. I want to tell you that I had talked to Henry about it in week four, after the legal pad. I had told him what I had read. I had told him what I thought. I had told him I wanted to try it. Henry, who had trusted me on what he ate and drank for forty-seven years, said all right Beverly. He stopped the medication on a Tuesday. We had not yet told the doctor.
When the bloodwork came back, Dr. Mahmoud sat in the chair across from us with the screen in his hand and he read the numbers and he stopped. He said well. He said hmm. He said let me look at this. He said Mr. Pickering your numbers are different. I want you to know that this is the first time I have ever seen this. He said your LDL is one fifty-two. He said your total cholesterol is one ninety-eight. He said this is higher than where we want it to be but it is also not as high as I would expect given that you have been off the medication. He said your HDL is forty-seven, which is good. He said your triglycerides are down. He said how do you feel.
Henry said I feel better than I have felt in ten years.
Dr. Mahmoud looked at Henry. He looked at the screen. He looked at me. He did not say anything for a moment. Then he said well, Mr. Pickering, I will not lie to you, I do not understand what is going on. He said your numbers are not where we like them, but the other things you are telling me — the cognition, the energy, the memory, your wife's report of you — those are also not what I would expect. He said let's monitor it. He said come back in three months. He said keep doing whatever you are doing.
We came back in three months. The LDL was 148. The total cholesterol was 192. Dr. Mahmoud said it again — he said I do not understand. He said but I cannot argue with how you are doing. He said keep doing what you are doing.
We did. We are still doing it. Henry drinks two cups a day. I drink one. The bottles are on the counter next to the coffee. We have not run out and we will not run out because I order them in advance now, because they have gone out of stock twice since I started telling the women in my circle and I will not be without them.
The website is https://shop.pipitea.com/ppch/sp. The guarantee is 90-day money-back. I will keep saying it.
If you are sitting in a pew or at a kitchen table watching the same thing I was watching, I want to talk to you for a minute.
I want to tell you that I am not anyone special. I am not a researcher. I am not a doctor. I am not a journalist. I am a woman in Macon, Georgia, who taught Sunday school for twenty-two years and noticed things and finally wrote them down. I am a woman who watched eight families walk down the same hallway and who did not have the words for what she was seeing for a very long time. I am a woman whose husband could not say the Apostles' Creed on the second Sunday of April, 2024, and who eight weeks later said it in his old voice, and who has said it every Sunday since.
I am telling you this because I owe it. I owe it to Eileen Carmichael, who held my hand at Walter's visitation and who started the tea last month and who told me on Tuesday that she wishes she had known about it three years ago. I owe it to Mary Lou Tomlinson, who started giving it to Bob in week two of this story and whose Bob no longer asks the same question every fifteen minutes. I owe it to Frances Ledbetter and to Annette Wadsworth and to both Earls and to Doug Henson and to my own Henry. I owe it to the woman reading this letter who is sitting at her kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a husband in the recliner in the next room who is staring at the television without seeing it.
The website is https://shop.pipitea.com/ppch/sp. The guarantee is 90-day money-back. You can try it for ninety days and if nothing happens you can send it back and you have not lost anything. That is more than the prescription ever offered.
I want you to do one thing for me. I want you to write down today's date. I want you to start the tea — two cups a day, in the morning, with breakfast, the way the directions say — and I want you to write down the date and then I want you to wait. I want you to watch the way I watched. I want you to keep a green notebook of your own if you are a notebook kind of person, or just keep it in your head if you are not. I want you to notice. Notice the small things. Notice the names that come back. Notice the questions he does not ask three times. Notice the way he picks up the newspaper. Notice the way he laughs at a joke he would not have laughed at last month. Notice what happens.
If nothing happens in ninety days, send it back. You will not have lost anything but a little time. If something happens — and I think something will — write me a letter. Not to me. I do not need it. Write the letter to the next woman, the woman three pews behind you who is watching the same thing you are watching, and tell her what you noticed.
That is the whole point of this. That is why I am writing it. We watched it happen for too many years and we did not say anything to each other because we did not have the words and because we thought it was just our husbands and not a pattern. But it was a pattern. It was a pattern across eight families in one congregation in middle Georgia, and I am sure it is a pattern across a thousand other congregations in a thousand other towns. The women see it. The women say nothing. The men decline. The doctors celebrate the numbers. The men decline some more.
I am not going to be silent anymore. I am not asking you to be silent either.
I am not a doctor. I am not anyone important. I am a woman who watched eight families and finally found the pattern, and the pattern had a name, and the name was not a name I had ever heard before in my life. I had to spell it three times to remember it. Adiponectin. It is a hormone. It is in your husband's body and yours and mine, and what we eat and drink can change how much of it our bodies make, and that has consequences for what happens inside our arteries that nobody is measuring at the doctor's office. I learned that in eight weeks of reading at the kitchen table after the morning my husband could not say the words he had been saying for sixty-one years. I am only one woman in one Methodist church in one small Southern city, but the women in my circle are no longer watching what we were watching, and that is more than I knew how to ask for a year ago.
I want you to try one thing in the first week. Not bloodwork. Not the doctor. Just one thing. I want you to ask your husband a question about something he used to know — the name of an old neighbor's dog, the score of a game from twenty years ago, the words to a song his mother sang to him — and I want you to see if the answer comes a little easier than it did last month. I want you to notice if a conversation at supper one night runs three minutes longer than the conversations have been running. I want you to notice if he picks up a book or a paper or a magazine and reads more than one paragraph at a sitting. Notice one small thing. Just one. Write it down. You will not need a green notebook for the first one. You will know it when you see it.
What finally convinced me to click the button on the order page that Friday afternoon at the kitchen table was the 90-day money-back guarantee. PiPi Tea offers it. The prescription never did. The prescription cost us about forty dollars a month for ten years and gave us back nothing if it did not work, and it took us ten years to figure out it was not working in the way that mattered. PiPi Tea will give us our money back in ninety days if it does not work. That is the kind of company I want to do business with. The website is https://shop.pipitea.com/ppch/sp.
They go out of stock. I have seen it happen twice since I started telling the women in my circle. The first time it went out of stock I had not yet ordered the second supply and I had four days when I had to make Henry's cups out of the dregs of what I had left, and I was scared, because I had watched what eight weeks of it had done and I did not want him to go back. They are available right now. I checked this morning. If you are thinking about it, do not think about it for a week. Order it while you can. The website is https://shop.pipitea.com/ppch/sp.
I want your husband to come back to you. I want him to say the words at church and remember the dog's name and read the paper in the morning and laugh at the joke he used to laugh at. I want you to write the letter to the woman three pews behind you. Please do not wait as long as I did.
— Beverly Pickering
Wesley Memorial Methodist Church
Macon, Georgia
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