Things of remembrance lost

I have seen the hour of endless twilight, and it is no pretty thing. It is all grayness, and mumbling. It is a haze of hallucination, and words without context. It is a slow, ruinous retreat from the world and all that humans love of it, until finally the mind is a vacant room with a vacant stare looking out from it.

I have seen dementia. My father had it. It was nasty and pitiless and stole everything he had ever been -- and when his death came, it felt like mercy.

And so when I read about Bart Starr's death, I felt an extra twinge. And when Bill Buckner died the next day, I felt an even stronger twinge.

Buckner, see, died at 69 of Lewy-Body dementia, which is what my father had. And Starr, in his last years, suffered a series of strokes and seizures that so diminished his mind that, four years ago, a reporter visited him and found he could no longer remember he'd been the quarterback of one of the most iconic football teams of all time, the Vince Lombardi Packers.

Couldn't remember Lombardi. Couldn't remember any of the five championships they'd won. Couldn't remember Jerry Kramer, or Fuzzy Thurston, or Jim Taylor, or Paul Hornung.

Couldn't remember the Ice Bowl, when the wind chill was 48 below and an industrial haze hung over Lambeau Field from the frozen breath of all those hardy Cheesehead fans. Couldn't remember how, aching and weary from being slammed to the concrete turf eight times by the Dallas pass rush, he finally ended it by burrowing into the end zone behind a road-grader block from Kramer and Kenny Bowman.

And Buckner?

At the end, could he remember how great a baseball player he'd been as a young man for the Dodgers and Cubs? Could he remember how he stoically soldiered on into baseball senior citizenry with his legs mostly gone? Or did Lewy-Body show an especially cruel streak and, over and over, take him in his mind to that moment when he couldn't get down on Mookie Wilson's slow roller, opening the door to yet more ballyhooed heartache for the Boston Red Sox?

He'll always be remembered for that play, unfairly, because it plays over and over in any video from the 1986 World Series. Yet time has done its work, softening hearts while sharpening perspective. The blame for this particular Red Sox choke now rests mostly where it should have all along, with manager John McNamara.

Buckner never should have been on the field at that juncture, not with his lack of mobility. It was a late-inning defensive switch that cried out to be made, and McNamara failed to make it. So what happened is on him, not on Buckner.

I hope that moment wasn't where he was in his mind, at the end. Or if it was, that the dementia scrambled it with some other memory, some other Lewy-Body hallucination.

I hope Bart Starr regained some sense of who he was, too, before the end.

Because he played for such a legend, and on such a legendary team, he didn't always get his due. But he was the perfect quarterback for those '60s Packers, an afterthought in college and the pros until Lombardi found him and saw something in him no one else did. And in time he became as iconic as the team for which he played.

I don't know how it was elsewhere in those days, but every time my uncle, cousin and I played football in the barnyard down in Wells County, we were always the Packers. My uncle, playing the seniority card, always got to be Bart Starr. My cousin was always Paul Hornung. I was always either Boyd Dowler or Carroll Dale, I can't exactly remember.

But I do remember enough. And I hope Buckner and Starr did, too, at the end.

One last small victory, it would have been. And surely not too much to ask.