Widow Shares Her Key Strengths of Giving and Forgiving

Maria Marquez spent the last half of the 20th century fulfilling her vow to obey her husband, for better or worse.

God forbid he should come home and not find her there with a meal ready. She kept his tortillas warm and his clothes clean. And she raised their 11 children, managing on an allowance allotted after he kept his gambling money.

Maria’s husband was an old-fashioned Mexican man. He commanded his household like a dictator and never sought his wife’s consent.

And she didn’t defy him. They were still young and living in Tijuana when he forced Maria to drop her first-aid classes, dashing her dream of becoming a nurse.

But the day would come when her nursing instincts would provide his only comfort--the dreadful day when this willful macho patriarch slipped into a helpless old age.

In the end, Maria would make a choice that turned her husband’s torment into a benefit for others.

More than two years ago, he started acting strangely. He’d hide his clothing and leave the water running. He’d forget where he put his cash and then accuse the whole family of stealing from him. He’d wander away from his La Habra home thinking Tijuana was just down the street. When police found him lost, bruised and dazed in San Diego, he was put in a home.

Eventually, Maria’s husband would lose the power she had always felt in his strong hands.

Now, it was time for Maria to take charge. It was her turn to make decisions for the only man she had ever been with, her partner of 51 years, Jose Guadalupe Marquez Alvarez.

As Jose slipped into the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s last year, Maria made two big decisions on his behalf.

First, she brought him home to care for him personally. She had always promised she would, especially during visits to those depressing nursing homes where she’d find him dehydrated and strapped to his wheelchair. She would always take him his favorite fresh bananas, then she’d assure him he was going to get better and get out.

“Let’s sneak out now,” Jose would say. “Let’s go back to Mexico.”

Her children warned her not to raise his hopes. But on Dec. 15, when Jose was wheeled into the apartment Maria had readied, she knew from his smile she had done the right thing.

Jose survived 11 final days at home, one rotation of the Earth for each of his children. His funeral was on New Year’s Eve, his 78th birthday.

By then, Maria had already carried out another crucial decision. She had given permission for doctors at UCI to extract her dead husband’s brain for research into the baffling disease. During the open-casket viewing, his tranquil expression gave no hint of the operation.

Maria’s consent bestowed a distinction on the man who spent 20 years packing catsup and cooking oil for Hunt Wesson in Fullerton. Jose Marquez became the first Latino to leave his brain to UCI’s Institute for Brain Aging and Dementia.

“Well, if his brain could serve to help humanity, then I was going to do it,” Maria explained to me recently in Spanish.

UCI researchers want more minorities to participate in the brain bank program, started in the early 1980s. They already know that certain genes

will increase the risk of the disease in one ethnic group, but not in another. To learn more about the variations, they need more brain donations from minority patients.

But cultural barriers get in the way, experts say.

Asians and Latinos sometimes see dementia as normal aging. Or they think their loved one went crazy. (“Se volvio loquita la abuelita,” Latinos might say.)

So when Alzheimer’s strikes, family members either hide it or ignore it. And that’s the worst thing they could do, said Dr. Malcolm Dick, a clinical neuropsychologist with the brain institute.

Patients who get an early diagnosis--mostly whites so far--respond better to drug treatments. If patients wait too long, the drugs don’t work and families find it harder to cope with the full-blown disorder.

Jose Marquez had stubbornly refused to see a doctor.

His family was desperate when they reached out for help last summer, two years after his symptoms started. He had been bounced from one nursing home to another, too belligerent for frustrated caregivers to handle.

Tony, 33, the youngest of the Marquez children, called Orange County’s Alzheimer’s Assn. for help. Not for his father, but for his mother. He asked for a Spanish speaker who could help her accept her husband’s incurable disease.

That’s how Maria met Lydia Cano, in charge of the association’s multicultural outreach program. It was Lydia who led the family to the UCI institute, one of seven state-designated Alzheimer’s research centers.

The secret to reaching Latinos is in the personal touch, says Lydia, whose grandmother died of Alzheimer’s. “They trust a person,” she said. “Not a program. Not a university. Not an association.”

Lulu Do Carmo, the ninth Marquez sibling, said Lydia was like a guide. “She opened our eyes about the disease,” she said. “She listened. And she knew what we were going through, since she had felt the same feelings.”

Lydia invited me recently to Maria’s 69th birthday party at Tony’s comfortable home off La Habra Boulevard. I sat next to Maria on a spongy couch under Tony’s framed Beatles posters.

Maria exuded that dignified reserve that marked Mexican women of my mother’s generation. As we talked through the afternoon, she never lost her ladylike posture nor removed the coat of her black dress suit.

Maria comes from an era when women defined themselves by service to their husbands and children. They were submissive, saintly and long-suffering, perhaps. But they knew how to give--and forgive--in ways that have gone out of style.

And they were survivors, with more power than was apparent.

For years while Jose worked here, Maria toughed it out alone in Tijuana where her five youngest were born. She tailored First Communion suits from left-over adult garments and played neighborhood nurse for extra money, giving flu and vitamin shots to the locals.

Even in the worst of times, she protected her husband, who had a long-standing history of psychosis with jealous delusions and feelings of persecution. Once, Jose pulled a kitchen knife on her over a pair of misplaced eyeglasses. She tried to hide the incident from Tony to avoid another family confrontation.

She didn’t want her husband sent back to a home.

“When he was ill, I no longer felt any of those bad memories of the old days,” said Maria, who recalled how much her husband loved to laugh and sing Mexican songs. “He was already paying for his faults with his suffering. I had no reason to feel rancor any more.”

Sure, Maria had always wanted her husband to be more responsible. To control his temper and stop using hostile language.

“I used to feel a great desperation because I wanted him to change and he didn’t,” she said in a lyrical Spanish. “That became my greatest sorrow because I struggled for the impossible. And instead of changing, he got sick.”

Maria kept a diary of her struggle with a disease she had to spell phonetically. On Aug. 17, she entered a point-by-point response to a counselor whose advice she did not appreciate.

Don’t talk so much about the past, the counselor had told her. Don’t go visit your husband so often. Don’t complain so much to your children because they get tired of hearing it.

“I don’t agree with that,” she wrote in the spiral notebook ragged from use and worry. “I’m of the opinion that a family must come together and decide how they can help in this situation with a patient with azaimes.”

In the end, it was Maria who knew her own mind. And she gave the final order in her marriage.

With her children gathered around Jose’s death bed, she instructed them to say they forgave their father. One by one they did so. Then Maria had the last word.

Todos te perdonamos. Vete agusto.

“We all forgive you,” she told her husband. “You can go in peace.”

Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.