An Interview With Dennis Kurttila

From Nashville, Tennessee, this is Hope for the Caregiver on America's Family Radio Station. It is the nation's number one radio program for the family caregiver. And we want to give a big shout out to American Family Radio for taking the time to value this program, to value this message on how it affects the family caregiver. Now, what is the difference between a family caregiver and a caregiver?

I've been asked that a lot. A paycheck. That's the difference because family caregivers are volunteering all across the country to take care of a loved one. They're doing it without pay and without resources a lot of times. And how do you help these folks? That's what this show is all about. I'm Peter Rosenberger.

Welcome to the show and we want to just take a moment. Yes, there is a show for caregivers on American Family Radio. Just for caregivers. And if you love somebody, you will be a caregiver. If you live long enough, you will need one. That's the reality of what we're facing in this country today.

With 65 million people doing this and the numbers are growing. Now, maybe it's an aging parent. Maybe it's a special needs child. Or in my case, a wife with traumatic injuries. 35 years ago, this fall, my wife had a horrific car wreck. She was 17 years old. Yesterday we found out she's going to have to go for surgery number 81. Both legs amputated in the 90s. She lives with relentless pain. 90 plus doctors.

Well over 10 million dollars. 12 hospitals. 7 different insurance companies. This has been my journey now for 32 years as her husband taking care of her through this process. And I'm the crash test dummy of caregivers. If you could fail at it, I failed at it. But you don't have to. You know the learning curve is very steep.

Do you have time to learn all the things I've learned in 32 years? I mean think about who you're taking care of. Think about what's going on in your family. Think about the carnage that's happening right now. Families are being torn apart by this.

Did you know that the divorce rate in families with a disability is almost 90 percent? Now think about that. How do you handle this? How are you doing? How do you pray? What do you pray? And I like to start off with a scripture and this is in Isaiah 26.

This is what helps me. Isaiah 26 3. You will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you because he trusts in you. Trust in the Lord forever. You will keep him in perfect peace.

Do you ever feel like your mind is basically a squirrel cage and it's just racing at 90 miles an hour and you're having late night conversations with a ceiling fan? Scripture understands that. There's nowhere in scripture where it tells me how to deal with a wife who's lost both legs and lives with relentless pain and all these surgeries. But it's filled with verses that tell me how to keep my mind calm.

How to settle myself down. How to strengthen myself in this because God is equipping us to deal with this. Perseverance. Faithfulness. Endurance. These are words that mean something all through scripture.

Now they don't necessarily sell very well out in media churches and media ministries because everybody wants to get their breakthrough. Everybody wants to get this fixed and move on and get on with the rest of their life. But for caregivers this is our life and it doesn't have to be a bad one.

It's difficult but it doesn't have to be harsh and ugly internally to us even though we have to sometimes look at very harsh things. We can be calm. We can even be joyful. Scripture tells us this and if you don't believe me go and look and Paul and Silas they were in a prison they were beaten and around midnight they're singing hymns. Now how many of us as caregivers around midnight after cleaning up the umpteenth mess we've cleaned up or doing laundry or dealing with some kind of meltdown in the middle of the night and we start singing hymns?

How many of us are doing that? Paul and Silas were doing it after they were beaten and if they can do it in a prison following a beating we can do it in a hospital room following a surgery. We can do it in a nursing home after watching our loved one go through all kinds of stuff or maybe they don't even know who we are anymore. We can do this.

Scripture tells us we can do it and that's what this show is all about. And I want to introduce a guest that I have on today who has to live in that very world. And this is Dennis Cottetto. Dennis tell me your last name again because it does not pronounce the way it sounds. Now we're from Finland so it's Kurtala. Kurtala. Kurtala.

That's not how you typed it out to send it to me. Sounds like D. Kurtala. Dennis Kurtala.

Dennis welcome to the show. And you've got a long career and a lot of music. People have heard your music and not necessarily known it was you.

Tell us a little bit about your back story and music then we're going to get into your journey as a caregiver. Well I moved to Nashville back in 91 to a playground for Steven Curtis Chapman and was on the road with him for about five years. And started my song writing actually back when I was in college with my first song for my wife, a song for Wendy. And then was mentored by Steven as a songwriter for a number of years. And had some success at that. Wrote a song called Evil Carry Me that Mark Schultz made a big old number one out of.

And it seemed a good pass that way. Played with Sandy Patty for a few years and that. And now I primarily just write and my daughter and I have a group called Whispers of Eternity that really kind of brings awareness to the Alzheimer's disease and caregivers as well. But we try to raise funds to find a cure.

Well let's talk about that a little bit. You started seeing some behavior changes in your wife when she was what age? Well it was in 2010 so she would have been 49. I guess 48 or 49 we started noticing. And that's very young for Alzheimer's. Yeah the early onset version of it though I'm told can start as early as the late 30's. And so there are cases even in 35 to 38 where people have begun that journey. Now when you saw these changes happening you didn't immediately start thinking Alzheimer's did you? No. That was probably the furthest thing from your mind was Alzheimer's.

Yeah it wasn't even close. We basically thought of it as just normal aging stuff because it's real subtle at its beginning. It's a disease that kind of creeps in like a mist. You don't really notice it at first. And so the signs were more things like just forgetfulness and misplacing things and that kind of stuff.

And so you start making lists and you know sort of combat those things in different ways. Yeah so the early parts were really not as dramatic as obviously as it progresses as it gets. Well then what turned?

When did you guys ramp this up and say wait a minute something's not cool here? Yeah she had a couple of minor accidents you know fender benders and things and her mother was actually diagnosed with Alzheimer's and Wendy would get lost coming from the airport which was sort of a normal trip for her. And it was starting to get to the point where we were you know looking at it going this something's not right here. But we we moved my mother-in-law from Casper Wyoming to Indiana where my brother-in-law and sister-in-law live and they I was to drive the truck basically from Casper pulling her car and all of her belongings out to Indiana and then Wendy was to meet me at her sister's house.

And we've been there many many times and she got lost for about seven hours and to the point where her phone ran out of battery and you know she was rescued by a kindly farmer that allowed her to use the phone and got a hold of her sister and it was a real process and it was very scary. So we thought you know it's time. Well we're gonna we're gonna continue talking about this.

Dennis thank you very much on that. Don't go away. We got to take a quick break because then it went from just a diagnosis to something even more difficult to deal with and we're gonna talk about how that affected you and your family. This is Peter Rosenberger. This is hope for the caregiver the nation's number one show for the family caregiver here on American Family Radio. We are so thrilled to have you with us. Don't go away. We've got more to go.

Hey this is Peter Rosenberger. Have you ever helped somebody walk for the first time? I've had that privilege many times through our organization Standing with Hope when my wife Gracie gave up both of her legs following this horrible wreck that she had as a teenager and she tried to save them for years and it just wouldn't work out and finally she relinquished them and thought wow this is it. I mean I don't have any legs anymore.

What can God do with that? And then she had this vision for using prosthetic limbs as a means of sharing the gospel to put legs on her fellow amputees and that's what we've been doing now since 2005 with Standing with Hope. We work in the West African country of Ghana and you can be a part of that through supplies through supporting team members through supporting the work that we're doing over there you could designate a limb. There's all kinds of ways that you could be a part of giving the gift that keeps on walking at standingwithhope.com. Would you take a moment to go out to standingwithhope.com and see how you can give.

They go walking and leaping and praising God. You could be a part of that at standingwithhope.com. Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver on American Family Radio. This is Peter Rosenberger bringing you three decades of experience to help you stay strong and healthy as you take care of someone who is not.

That is Wake Up in Heaven by Dennis Curdela and his daughter Lacey he wrote this for his wife Wendy who has Alzheimer's and it's a beautiful song and Dennis that's available on iTunes isn't it? Not yet. We've got a CD that's available and at this point we're working towards a record. Great, great. Well listen we were talking in the last segment about the situation your wife is a young woman I mean in her late 40s that's a young woman and it's getting younger every day by the way. That is and she started forgetting things she lost her way from the airport and all the stuff and then you realize okay this thing is taking a different turn this is not just normal aging and I forgot something. Something's going on with her and then you went and got a diagnosis but then it went even more dark than you'd ever imagined. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah the diagnosis day is a particularly hard day obviously that's the point where you realize that life has changed but then almost immediately after the diagnosis Wendy had to take a driving test and failed the driving test and then her driving privileges were taken away and that began sort of the first of many, many different real disappointing and very difficult changes that had to take place to take care of her and to make sure that she was safe and it's a difficult road. What else happened? Well in the course of the progression of the disease and I'm assuming that you want me to go kind of further down the road with this. I do indeed.

Okay. In the progression of the disease then she began to lose the ability to do work around the house and do basic things and she had a period of time when and as those things came off of her plate obviously this came onto my plate and so I started cooking and cleaning and doing laundry and all the stuff that goes with that and then you know the incontinence and other difficulties arise and with that aggressiveness and combativeness and then at one point my daughter had been picking her for a few days a week to give me a chance to work and for her to be safe. In between those times she fell down a flight of stairs and was bruised up pretty badly. She didn't end up going to the hospital with that one, but it became obvious that we had to have that help and that's when Lacy really stepped in and started caring for her a few days a week while I was working. Eventually that led to in 2016 I was a senior manager at a company in Nashville and it was a little too challenging and so we sort of neutrally agreed, but I was really let go from that company and given a severance package of six months and then I was caring for her basically full time at the house and then we started my construction business that I had done in between things and I would take her on job types and until she got combative and aggressive actually with my clients and then that became impossible as well and then it escalated to the point where her aggression and her combativeness got to the place where she would argue with the person that she saw in the mirror because she didn't understand that that was her anymore and in some ways Alzheimer's patients kind of regress back to childhood so they don't recognize that person because they perceive themselves to be young because all the memories of their age sort of disappear as they're going or at least that's how it happens with Wendy. But she got in an argument with the person in the mirror.

Go ahead. Did she strike you? Oh yeah.

Yeah. Her aggression was... How did you deal with that? I mean that had to have broken your heart.

As hard as I could. How did you deal with it? Well, you do the best that you can to remember that it's the disease causing and not the person and that's hard to separate sometimes when they're angry and you know there are episodes that probably can never be spoken of that were very, very aggressive towards me. For a period of time I had scars on my arms all the time from her scratching me and bruises and that and you know in your heart that it's not them that's doing it, but it's still them that's doing it and so you really... It requires a lot of strength on your part not to respond in kind because that's just not possible. If you're dealing with somebody in that disease, it's really not them that's doing that even though it is them. It's really hard to separate that sometimes. It's the face that you love and the hands that you've held that are now doing this but as I tell folks, they're not doing it to you.

They're just doing it because they don't understand and you're right, but that's got to be... There had to have been some bitter tears on your part later on. It's very hard. It is very hard and you're doing your best to take care of, especially their hygiene and things like that, so bathing bathroom times and things like that and those are the very points where they don't understand and they get aggressive and then it does ramp up towards, at least with Wendy, where she was aggressive pretty much all of the time which caused me not to be able to sleep in the same room with her and eventually she broke a glass against the mirror arguing with the person in the mirror and cut her hand and wouldn't allow me to help her to the emergency room and so we had to sort of forcibly, Lacey and I, Lacey came to my house and helped me, we had to take her to the emergency room and at that point it was pretty obvious that you can't toddler-proof a house for an adult. How did this change your faith? Well you learn how, at least my faith, from what God was teaching me and I'm sure you realize this, but when you have kids you realize how selfish you are.

It sort of brings that out. That's one of the lessons of having kids is you realize, and it's all been about me, Alzheimer's is very similar in that you start to realize that my life and my desires and my dreams and my goals are mine. They're things that I'm striving for and I'm striving for those in order to provide, in order to take care of my family and my wife, but they are protected territory and that selfishness is one of the first things that has to go. So God really taught me a lot of lessons in not getting aggressive in return, but also in remembering that this isn't just about me and it's just this life that I committed to my wife for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness, in health, till death to this part.

You know, those are easy words to say when you're standing with your beautiful bride of 19 years old at the altar and you've got your whole life ahead of you. But when it comes down to this time, this is where the rubber meets the road and that was the commitment that I made and that was what God really healed in me was that commitment to continue to serve and continue to love in spite of some of these circumstances. There's a thing I refer to a lot of caregivers go through.

It's called the caregiver fog. Fear, obligation and guilt and it's very easy to get lost in that fog and get hurt in that fog because we don't know where we are. We feel so lost.

We are so paralyzed with fear at times. How are we going to do this? What's going to happen?

What are we going to do? We feel obligated. I got to do this.

I need to do this. I have to do this and then we start getting resentful because we feel obligated and then we live with terrible guilt. Does that resonate with you?

It does. The resentment, not so much because at least in my circumstance, I don't look at it as something that's being done to me as much as this is my ministry to serve her. And so the frustrations and stuff that really come more based on the circumstances now, the desperation and the depression that comes with it and even some of the guilt, you know, when I had to make the decision in January of this year to start looking for a place for her to be safe in a nursing home and I had committed to myself that I was never going to do that, that that's just the place that people go to die. And I had to change that opinion because it wasn't says for her to be at the house. Well, you know, as soon as I realized that, the day that I drove up to our house and looked at this place that we had raised our kids in and been for 25 years together and realized that she was never coming home, I said, that's when it's hard to get over. And I still had a hard time with that, to be honest. Well, and I don't think that's a feeling that's going to go away anytime soon or easily at all.

That's about as raw as it gets. And they say that Alzheimer's is the long goodbye. And it's so difficult for caregivers. And this is why I wanted to have you on today to talk about your story, to share your story, share your music, because there are people right now listening all across the country and the world, and they're hearing their story in your voice because they're saying, oh, my goodness, that's me.

This is what I'm dealing with. And now somebody else has given them the courage to say, you know what, I feel this way and you've trusted God in this. And if you found God to be faithful in your situation, then that's the goal here.

So they can look and say, oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, if he can trust God in that, then that gives me the courage to trust God with my stuff too, that God has not abandoned me. And what you're doing also is you're painting a picture of Christ loving his wounded bride. And I dedicated my book Hope for the Caregiver to Christ, the ultimate caregiver of a wounded bride, because that's us.

We are the wounded bride of Christ. And what you're doing is modeling that, Dennis, and I want you to know how much it means to not only me as a fellow husband and a caregiver, but to somebody listening. How can people get in touch with you if they want to get in touch with you, Dennis? Well, they can reach me at dennis at denniscurdler.com. And if they go to that site, there's actually a phone number there. Spell that out for them.

Spell it out for them real quick. That's b-e-n-n-i-s at d-e-n-n-i-s-k-u-r-t-t-i-l-a dot com. Great. All right, listen, hey, and you can see more about this show at hopeforthecaregiver.com. We got to go. We'll be right back. This is Peter Rosenberger on Hope for the Caregiver.

We'll be right back. Have you ever struggled to trust God when lousy things happen to you? I'm Gracie Rosenberger. And in 1983, I experienced a horrific car accident leading to 80 surgeries and both legs amputated. I questioned why God allowed something so brutal to happen to me.

But over time, my questions changed, and I discovered courage to trust God. That understanding, along with an appreciation for quality prosthetic limbs, led me to establish Standing with Hope. For more than a dozen years, we've been working with the government of Ghana and West Africa, equipping and training local workers to build and maintain quality prosthetic limbs for their own people. On a regular basis, we purchase and ship equipment and supplies.

And with the help of inmates in a Tennessee prison, we also recycle parts from donated limbs. All of this is to point others to Christ, the source of my hope and strength. Please visit standingwithhope.com to learn more and participate in lifting others up.

That's standingwithhope.com. I'm Gracie, and I am standing with hope. In the morning, when I rise. In the morning, when I rise.

In the morning, when I rise. Give me Jesus. Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver on American Family Radio. We are so glad you're with us, and this is Peter Rosenberger bringing you three decades of experience to help you stay strong and healthy as you take care of someone who is not. 65 million people in America right now are dealing with this. Aging loved ones, special needs children, traumatic injuries, chronic disease.

There's so many different scenarios. And when you place yourself between somebody who is impaired and even worse, disaster, it takes a toll on you. And it could be somebody with mental health issues.

It could be somebody with a substance abuse problem or alcoholism. No matter what the impairment, there's a caregiver somewhere in that orbit who is being squeezed, pushed, crushed at times. And this show is for you. And if you want to see more about what we're doing, go to hopeforthecaregiver.com.

Hopeforthecaregiver.com. And you can check out, you can get a free chapter of the book. There's audio out there. There's music that you can have. I've got a new book that's coming out this fall, Seven Caregiver Landmines and How You Can Avoid Them. And there's so much more. Sign up for our e-letter. There's just so many things that you can do at Hope for the Caregiver.

We're putting it all out there for you to take advantage of it. Will you promise me that you'll do that? Do not try to do this all alone. Do not try to white knuckle this thing by yourself. You can't do it.

It's too difficult. And nobody knows that more than my guest that is on right now, Dennis Kurtula. He's with us.

He has a lengthy career in the music business, drumming for Stephen Curtis Chapman, writing hit songs, drumming for Sandy Patty, writing more hit songs. And all of a sudden when things were just going swimmingly, his wife in her late 40s is diagnosed, early diagnosis with Alzheimer's. And it went from just forgetting a few things to being combative, to being something that it was just, it was ripping the family apart. And he was lost in this situation of knowing what to do. How do you deal with this? There's somebody that you love and you're looking at the face of the person you fell in love with.

You're holding the hands of the person you fell in love with. And now all of a sudden that face and those hands are coming at you with combativeness due to this horrible disease. And this is a story that Dennis and his family have gone through. Dennis, as you struggled with this and you had to come home after putting her in a facility because there was no way she could stay at home anymore, and you had to accept the fact that you're going to go on with the rest of your life, you have to. I mean, that's the way it is.

You can't just curl up in a ball and die yourself. You've got to go on. You've got children. You've got two daughters. Is that right?

That's correct, yeah. And tell me about your daughters and how they journeyed with you in this. Well, my daughter in the Nashville area, Lacey, has been one of my support people. She works with me during the days. We sing together in Whispers of Eternity, and she basically became a part of my family, local family, again. She's been married for a number of years to a wonderful man, Josh Corbett. I have three grandkids with her, so I'm very grateful for that. But they really took me in in some ways, and we still spend Friday nights together, and she works with me during the day. So, she's been a big blessing to me. My other daughter, Andrea, lives in California, on Grayton Beach, actually. This is a long ways away.

I guess it's Hermosa Beach now. She just moved. But she designs shoes, and she's a brilliant, brilliant designer. And so, she has come out a number of times, but is unable to be there on a regular basis because of the responsibilities of her job.

So, we keep in touch with, and technology allows us to do a lot that we couldn't do before. So, it's nice to be able to Skype with her and keep her updated on what's going on with her mom. Is Lacey with you now? Yes, she is.

Can you put her on? Yeah. Hello. Hey, Lacey, how you feeling? I'm doing good today, Peter.

How are you? Well, for a man of my age and limited abilities, I'm all right. Well, listen, let me ask you a question. You've watched your dad go through this. Talk about how you feel about that journey of watching him go through this. Then we'll get to your journey as well, too, and we'll talk about both of you.

Sure. It's heart-wrenching, to be honest. From the very beginning, you see the signs and the progression of the disease, and there's very little you can do to turn it around or to stop it, or even to encourage both my mother and my dad, who's watching her fade away slowly. And the most that I'm capable of doing is being at his side and praying with him, and I'm doing everything I can to be supportive. In the moments where I was able to be with my mom and to take care of her, the same struggles he had of trying to stay calm and not responding in kind were the same struggles that I would deal with as well, and keeping her happy in a scenario where she did not recognize me. I mean, I was one of the memories that faded much sooner than probably my dad faded from her memory. And so most of the time when she was with me, she just saw me as a nice person who was being kind to her. And you did your best to provide. Do you feel like you were able to offer, I mean, to get some kind of closure, were you able to say goodbye to her in a way that was meaningful to you?

Yeah, I guess in some ways I did. I mean, especially when she went into the hospital with the cut hand and never was able to return home. There were moments in that where you spend time alone with her in her room while everybody else is out getting coffee or having to use the restroom.

And you have those moments of looking her in the eye and telling her you love her and you're so sorry. And I don't think she was able to understand what I was saying in those moments, but they were good closure moments for me. Did you find that music stayed with her a little bit longer than even words?

It did, yeah. She was coming and trying to carry a tune right up until probably a couple months ago. There was a period of time where even when she was with my father and they would come to church on Sundays, she would sing on stage with the group that follows, you know, that we lead worship. And we're at a very understanding church that was willing to let her be on stage, even if most of what she sang came out undisturnable and off because it was praise, and it didn't matter if it was a good sound as long as it was a sound made to God.

And so yeah, I stayed with her longer. Do you know that if you could say one thing to churches, to pastors about families who are dealing with this issue on more effective ways to minister to them or whatever, what would you say to those pastors in those churches? It would be best to come alongside them and be present. Pray in the hard moments and keep reminding the family members they're not alone. It's so easy to feel isolated when you're in the middle of it, and it's so many times people will want to leave you alone so that they don't get involved in your personal business or embarrass you, but being alone is one of the worst possible things that can happen when you're struggling with this disease. And if you don't mind me asking, how old are you, Lacy?

I am 35 years young. Lacy, that is very young to have the kind of wisdom that you just offered, and I know that there are people listening, truly listening, all over the country right now. A lot of them have tears coming down their faces and filling up their eyes because they do feel alone, and they wish their pastor or their churches would be able to speak into their isolation. And you just did that with such gentleness and such tenderness, and I want you to know that you will never know the impact that you just made until you get to heaven, and then it won't matter anymore because we'll all be with Jesus.

But you did make an impact just now, and it is a powerful thing to say that. And I want to encourage pastors and church leaders, and if you're listening, go to your pastor and tell your pastor what Lacy just said, because that's how you do it. You can't fix this.

Lacy and Dennis will be the first to tell you that you cannot fix this issue. But what you can do is you can care for them in it, and you don't have to go in there and try to give a bunch of answers and try to figure it all out, or why God's doing this or whatever. You don't have to do anything, really. In Job 2 13, his friends just sat there with him for seven days quiet. Sadly, too many of us don't know how to sit with somebody for seven minutes and be quiet. But when you're suffering like this, bringing that kind of wisdom and gentleness to the table, the humility of just being with them, that ministry of presence, that is a beautiful thing. Lacy, I want you to know how much I appreciate that.

Listen, we've got to run. Would you do me a favor? Would you give out your website one more time here so folks can find out more about you and hear your music and hear your songs? That was you singing at the beginning of this coming in.

I failed to mention that earlier. And I want people to be able to hear what you've got. What's the best way to get in touch with you? Again, the best email address that you can use to contact us right now is dennis at dennis curtola dot com. Now, is the website dennis curtola dot com?

It's on Facebook, too. Oh, do you don't have a website? We're still building a website.

We're in the process of getting those things in place. All right. Well, dennis at dennis curtola dot com, and that's spelled out your last name or his last name. Sure.

It's dennis, D-E-N-N-I-S, at dennis curtola, D-E-N-N-I-S-K-U-R-T-P-I-L-A dot com. Perfect. And listen, I want you to know how much I appreciate you coming on the show and sharing your family's heart and your story. You've touched a lot of lives today, and it's going to be, and mine included, and I thank you for that. Okay, Lacey? Thank you very much.

All right. Hug your dad, and we've got to go. This is Hope for the Caregiver on American Family Radio. We are so glad that you joined us. We've got more to go, but I want you to hear this family, because as you deal with this, please know you are not alone.

She just said it beautifully. You're not alone, and there are others that are dealing with it, and that's why I love doing this radio show, because we're able to punch into that isolation with the light of the gospel and tell you that God knows you. He knows your name. He knows your loved one's affliction. He understands what's going on with it.

He is working to make all things new. We can't always see it, but we trust Him. How do we know we trust Him? Because we look at His hands, His scarred hands, and we put our scared hand into His scarred hands.

He bore all of this on the cross, and the longer we walk with Him, the more we realize how big the cross is. This is hope for the caregiver. This is the hope for the caregivers, the hope of the gospel.

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