A passing connection

And now Jerry Sloan.

As if Al Kaline weren't enough. As if Don Shula weren't enough. As if Mike "Mad Dog" Curtis and Glenn Beckert and almost 100,000 dead from the Bastard Plague in three months weren't enough.

This year, man. This benighted, ax-murdering, gaping jackhole of a year.

Now it's taken Jerry Sloan, who was Mister Chicago Bull, and don't give me any of your Michael Jordan guff. Jerry Sloan was one of the Original Bulls, and he both played for and coached them, and his name is all over their record books. He played with Chet Walker and Bob Love and Norm Van Lier and Clifford Ray, and his number (4) was the first the Bulls ever retired. And after he coached the Bulls, he went on to coach the Utah Jazz for 23 years -- which means he's Mister Utah Jazz, too.

He's one of the great coaches in NBA history. And now he is gone, at 78. And I know far more about that than anyone should.

Jerry Sloan, you see, died of complications from Parkinson's disease with attendant Lewy body dementia. Same as my dad.

And so I feel for his wife, Tammy, and his family, because I know what it's like to watch a loved one slip away from you by slow increments. I know what it's like to watch a bright, loving, meticulous man retreat to the shadows until there's nothing left but the shadows, nothing left but an empty, mumbling shell staring off into space and occasionally chuckling or pointing at things only he could see.

Sometimes my dad would see imaginary children standing in the corner or traipsing down the hall in Kingston Memory Care, where he spent his last years. He would say he was going to work every day at a place he called The Peninsula, and it had something to do with a play and someone he called the Commander. He would tell me he'd finally sold the Model T, or that a high school classmate long dead had come to visit him.

A lot of days, toward the end, he'd say nothing.

I can't imagine how it must have been to watch something very like that happen to Jerry Sloan. I'm guessing it was like watching him slowly disappear before your eyes, because that's the way it was with my dad.

One week he's there. The next he's a little less there. And so on, and so on, and so on, until he's vanished entirely.

Damn you, 2020. Damn you.