Mayor Looks to His No. 1 Constituent

Humor, the support of family and friends and belief in God have helped Mayor Harry Dotson cope with his wife’s illness, he says.

Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a progressively debilitating neurodegenerative disease, Natalie Dotson began losing her ability to carry out everyday tasks several years ago. Her hands trembled. She lost her balance easily. Her right arm became useless. And, already beset with a hearing problem, her speech became more and more garbled.

Her loss of speech is the most difficult, the mayor says. He misses the responses of his wife of 47 years.

“I question the guy upstairs. Why the two of us at the same time?” asked Harry Dotson, who suffers from arthritis and bad knees, ailments that force him to use a walker.

The mayor and his wife met almost 50 years ago in Springfield, Mass., where Natalie grew up and the mayor attended college. They moved to the West Coast and after relatively short stays in Oregon and Los Angeles, moved to Stanton in 1959. Until his retirement in 1982, the mayor worked for the U.S. Civil Service Commission and the U.S. Department of Energy. Natalie raised their two children.

Even under the pall of illness, the mayor says he tries to keep things light. Although they can’t talk like they used to, they still communicate. The two adults of over 70 years playfully stick out their tongues at one another. In the middle of the night, he reaches out and holds her hand.

The mayor says he tries not to get frustrated when her loss of motor control causes her to knock over a full glass or lunge forward and fall. “Sometimes I get a little exasperated, but I know I shouldn’t. If I overreact, I always make sure to tell her I’m sorry.”

The mayor insists that he isn’t a martyr, that he’s not alone in taking care of his wife. His daughter has been with them every step of the way. Neighbors pitch in by doing small things: bringing the newspaper up to the front door, taking out the garbage.

The prayers of friends and a belief in God have also helped. But most of all, he says, what sustains him are their history together, a deep bond and a knowledge that she would do the same if “the shoe was on the other foot.”

Judy Silber can be reached at (714) 966-5988.