When Deanne Veitch was in Grade 1, she took on the bully who teased that her father had only one arm.
At lunchtime, angry and crying, she ran the short distance from school to the family home in the Edgemont area of North Vancouver and jumped on to Denny Veitch's lap to tell Daddy all about the mean boy and the silly thing he had said.
"My dad just smiled at me and I looked," Deanne recalls, "and I can't imagine what was in my little-kid head at that moment, but: 'You really do only have one arm!' "
Veitch was so strong and capable and commanding in everything he did, such as running the B.C. Lions in the late 1960s before becoming the Vancouver Whitecaps' general manager the following decade, it was incomprehensible to his little girl that he was doing it without one arm due to Denny's childhood accident with a train.
"My father had a larger-than-life personality," Deanne says.
And that's the way Denny Veitch stayed, right up until Alzheimer's disease took away most of what he had been. He died three days before Christmas of last year. He was 80.
Deanne and her husband, Whitecaps' president Bob Lenarduzzi, were in the final months of that nightmare when Bobby's mother, Clelia, was diagnosed with dementia and began a rapid decline from the person she used to be.
Dementia is an erosion of brain function affecting everything from memory to behaviour. It is associated with Alzheimer's disease.
Clelia, 90, still lives in the home on Dundas Street in East Vancouver, where she helped raise four boys and could gauge the Whitecaps' performance - with Bobby in the lineup - by sitting on her sundeck and listening for the roar of the crowd from Empire Stadium, about a kilometre away.
But she requires round-the-clock professional care and although Clelia has good days and bad days, the Lenarduzzis know that things will get worse.
"With Denny going through what he went through, you saw the regression," Bob says. "Then I look at my mum and know it isn't going to get any better because that's the nature of the illness - there is no cure. The saddest thing for me is my mum as I knew her, I've kind of lost that relationship.
"It's hard. But, like most things, you don't accept it but you understand this is the way it is. You just need to accept there are things you need to do."
Like make sure his mum is cared for, and that there is a steady stream of family members and friends to visit with her and talk about the old days, that there are plans in place.
The need-to-do list for Bob and Deanne doesn't include sharing their painful ordeal about losing parents to dementia and Alzheimer's. But the Lenarduzzis are telling their story to help de-stigmatize a disease that the Alzheimer Society of B.C. says afflicts 70,000 people in this province - a figure projected to double in the next 20 years.
"The thing you learn from the Alzheimer Society's people is nobody wants to talk about this," Bob says. "For me, the best outcome is a little more awareness. And if that's what we achieve, great. A lot of people are going through this."
AWARENESS IS CRUCIAL
B.C. Alzheimer Society Chief Executive Officer Jean Blake says raising awareness about the disease is paramount.
"We know people who have the disease will often not seek diagnosis early enough," she says. "Similarly, we know that family carers end up feeling isolated and sometimes hopeless because they feel there's nothing that can be done. But in the early stage, there are a number of programs that help people connect and make it much easier for the people with dementia and the family members who care for them.
"There is a great need for more research. We still don't know what the cause is, so therefore we don't have any kind of cure. Many families, because of the stigma associated with it, are not comfortable making people aware of it. But there is nothing to be ashamed of. It is a disease that sees a progressive degeneration of the brain."
Denny Veitch spent his final three years in a care home, although his battle with Alzheimer's lasted six years. Deanne and her sister, Karen, took turns staying with their dad although Deanne admits that she was in denial about the disease for a long time.
"He taught us how to ski, how to swim, how to water ski," she says. "We were all competitors in every sport, and he taught us all those things. I grew up with the attitude: Don't take no for an answer because anything is possible. I think we learned that from him.
"I'm a lot like my dad. I denied (Alzheimer's) a lot longer than anyone else. I'd say: 'He's OK, he's just getting older.' If there was a situation where he forgot something, I'd just make light of it or find a way to get around it. I swore to him I'd never put him in a home. I was terrified of that for him. Obviously, later on, I found out caregivers are amazing people.
"He was somebody who was always there for the family; that was his No. 1 priority. We were his priority. He was just a really great source of strength and support our entire lives as children. For me, that person ... that guy who was so strong and witty and funny and supportive and intelligent and confident, all those things were being depleted and he became a completely different person over the period of time he had Alzheimer's."
Denny left the Whitecaps in 1977 after his wife, Iris, got breast cancer. She died within three months. Deanne was 20.
She married Bobby a few years later. Bobby had broken Denny's rule with the Whitecaps by dating one of the soccer team's game-day hostesses, who also happened to be the general manager's daughter. Comically, Karen also married a player, Darryl Samson, so maybe Denny wasn't as fierce and intimidating as his reputation.
Deanne is the western Canadian manager for Lancome cosmetics.
'INTIMIDATING' AURA
"It wasn't until well into our marriage that I actually felt completely comfortable with him and would joke with Denny," Bobby says. "He had this aura about him. Intimidating. He stopped being the GM because his wife got cancer."
And partly because Iris Veitch died so young, Deanne developed a mother-daughter relationship with Clelia Lenarduzzi. Bobby's father, Giovanni, died in 1996. Clelia is the couple's last surviving parent, the last living grandparent for Bob and Deanne's children, Ryan, 29, and Sunny, 25.
"For me, it was just devastating," Deanne said of Clelia's diagnosis a little more than a year ago. "I couldn't believe we were going to go down that path again. It escalated extremely quickly. I hadn't had my mother around since I was 20, so Bobby's mum was like my mum. She's been a big part of my life. It was a big hit, for sure, and too close together.
"At the same time, talking to people, it made me realize this disease is so huge. It impacts so many families - more than we know because a lot of people simply don't talk about it."
According to the Alzheimer Society, 40 per cent of people report being treated differently or avoided by friends, family and colleagues after being diagnosed with dementia. It's not surprising, then, that one in four sufferers conceal their diagnosis.
Deanne Lenarduzzi admits this was a "rough" Christmas for her family, coming on the first anniversary of her dad's death. The Veitch children, who include a brother in Seattle, spent Christmas together for the first time in years and leaned on each other for support over the holidays.
"It was wonderful to have everybody together, and we got through it," Deanne says. "The thing that you remember is the father you once had was not the father you had in those last six months of his life. He was disappearing on us. And those are the memories that are still kind of fresh, so you try to get back to the good memories of what he was before the disease. We talked a lot about those happy memories."
Like when a little girl could skip into her father's lap to feel safe and believe he was indestructible.
