Have the Last Dance with Me

How did those little moments of forgetfulness in her husband, those lapses in decision-making over the most normal of things in life, turn into a full-blown, debilitating neurological disease? Everything seemed so perfect for Herman Fichtner: highly educated, a successful career, Navy fighter pilot with a loving wife and family. He was living what seemed to be an ideal life in a picturesque New England town. Then something changed. No one knows exactly when it happened, but his wife began having nagging thoughts in the back of her mind that something just wasn’t right with Herm. Thoughts of him “not being right” turned out to be true. What followed was a downward spiral of mental acuity that the medical community could not diagnose, much less offer any real help or hope. This is a story of a wife’s struggle to make sense of how this perfect life could unravel before her eyes, and how she tried to piece it back together with humor, love, compassion and fierce determination to find out what happened to the man she loved.