Lost and Found

An old lady with Alzheimer's went to a ballgame in the Bronx. What a wondrous day it was.

A crowd of 44,292 turned out at Yankee Stadium for the club’s most recent home game, on the final day of July. It was a Thursday matinee against the Tampa Bay Rays. The Yankees won, 7-4. The game was interrupted for a couple of hours by a summer monsoon. But that’s not the story.

One of the fans in attendance was an 87-year-old Chilean American named Maria Cecilia Willi. She grew up in the idyllic oceanside city of Vina del Mar, in a family with deep ties to the Chilean navy. In 1960, she met a U.S. Naval officer whose ship stopped at port in her city. The officer, Edward J. Willi, Jr., was from the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He joined the Navy after graduating from Dartmouth in 1955. He was immediately enchanted by the beauty and charm of this young Chilean woman. A whirlwind courtship ensued, and on March 4, 1961, Edward and Cecilia were married in a Catholic Church not far from the Pacific Ocean.

Edward didn’t just fall in love with Cecilia; he quickly became smitten by her country - its culture and people and remarkable geography, including a coastline of more than 2,600 miles (almost four times the length of California’s) that stretches from deserts in the north to the mountains and glaciers of Patagonia in the south. Edward learned Spanish and wound up starting his own import-export company, finding U.S. markets for Chilean products. He would fly to Chile so often that he knew many of the airline gate agents, baggage handlers and flight-crew members by name. He dreamed of retiring to Chile with Cecilia and owning una pequeña granja (a small farm).

The only thing that Chile did not have, then or now, is the New York Yankees. You go find your most dedicated baseball fan; I will put Ed Willi up there with anyone. He started going to Yankee games in 1943, at age 10. I know this because he kept score, and we have the scorecard. It features names like Bill Dickey, Charlie Keller, Joe Gordon and Snuffy Stirnweiss. Ed’s favorite Yankee centerfielders - Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Mickey Rivers and Bernie Williams – spanned more than half a century. He developed a special place for the Yankees’ classy Japanese import, Hideki Matsui.

There’s no scorecard that I can find that marks the first time Cecilia accompanied Ed to a Yankee game, but it was a regular occurrence. Cecilia didn’t know a pitcher’s mound from a batter’s box, but her husband loved to go games, so she joined him, the same way that he would join her at the Metropolitan Opera or the Museum of Modern Art. Cecilia came to love going to the Stadium, too, even if part of her motivation was to monitor Ed’s hot dog and ice cream consumption. Sometimes their crossovers from sport to culture didn’t go well. One October, Ed and Cecilia were in the Vienna Opera House. The Yankees were playing in the World Series. Ed naturally was listening via an earpiece on his everpresent transistor radio when he squirmed in his seat and dislodged the earpiece, unleashing the stentorian voice of John Sterling into the fabled opera hall.

“You should’ve seen the dirty looks I got,” Ed said, noting that the dirtiest of them came from Cecilia.

Yankee fans are quick to point out that their club has won more world championships than any other, but Ed was no sort of frontrunner. Not long after I started dating his daughter, Denise, I was over at their hilltop house in West Redding, Conn. It was late September and the Yankees were having an uncharacteristically poor year. Sixteen and a half games out of first place, they were playing the then-Indians in Cleveland. Ed had the game on his transistor as we ate dinner.

Six years later – Sept. 17,1988 – Denise and I got married at a little stone church in the Catskill Mountains. At it happens, the Yankees were in Fenway Park that day playing the Red Sox. At 4 p.m., Ed walked his only child down the aisle. A little after 5 p.m., as we shook hands on the receiving line, he whispered in my ear, “Red Sox won, 3-1.”

Ed’s health and mobility began to falter as he reached into his 80s, and getting to the Stadium became too much for him. After he passed in 2018, Cecilia had her own health challenges to deal with, most notably Alzheimer’s disease, a condition that was first diagnosed in 2012 and was starting to move into later stages. She remained cheerful and upbeat, but her confusión dramatically worsened and so did her short-term memory. It was getting harder and harder to reach her.

Denise decided to move Cecilia out of an assisted-living facility and into a spacious, sunlit apartment near the Hudson River, with round-the-clock aides. The apartment is across the street from a vibrant senior center that has regular activities and outings. Earlier this summer, Denise noticed that the center was planning a trip to Yankee Stadium. Seniors would be transported on a luxury coach and provided with special seating for the disabled.

“Mom, do you want to go to a Yankee game? Remember how we used to go with Dad all the time?” Denise asked.

Cecilia probably did not understand what Denise was talking about. But she nodded and even seemed excited.

When game day came, Jenny Hincapie, who officially is an aide but is really more like a second daughter and cherished family member, outfitted Cecilia in a new Yankee tee-shirt and hat. On the bus trip, sitting alongside Denise and Jenny, Cecilia started to sing/hum “Take Me Out To The Ballgame.” When she arrived at her seat in Section 228 in a wheelchair-accessible área along the left-field line, Cecilia smiled and waved her hands like a conductor.

“Go Yankees!” she said

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Cecilia Willi (r.) and Jenny Hincapie

Denise hadn’t seen her mother look so vital, and happy, in years. In the bottom of the first, Giancarlo Stantion, the Yankees’ DH, came up with Cody Bellinger on first. Stanton crushed a ball halfway up the left-field bleachers. Cecilia followed the flight of the ball the whole way. When the Stadium erupted, it was almost as if the euphoria lifted her out of her chair. The Yankees went up 7-0, and the Rays cut it to 7-4 and then the downpour started. The weather turned chilly. The senior-center staff rightly decided it wasn’t wise to wait out a long rain delay. The seniors returned to the bus for the trip back to Tarrytown.

I once read about a family member of an Alzheimer’s patient who asked a social worker whether there was any benefit to visiting or making the effort to take their loved one places when the Alzheimer patient wasn’t even going to remember.

The social worker replied, “They may not remember you were there or where they went, but they will remember how they felt.”

When I met Cecilia, Denise and Jenny after they got off the bus, I said to Cecilia, “I hear you had a great day.”

“My mother and father,” she said.

“Did you have fun at the ballgame?”

She looked at me beneath her Yankee hat and smiled. I am pretty sure she remembered how she felt.