O’Connor sat down beside him and held his other hand. When she came to visit John at his care home, she found him sitting on a bench holding the woman’s hand. But she told the press and her friends that she was happy that John, who no longer recognized her, was content. Army as a judge, and the OConnors lived for three years in West Germany, with Sandra working as a civilian. She had learned it growing up on a cattle ranch in the high desert, where the cattle died if the rains did not come.Ībout two years after he entered the care facility, John, like some Alzheimer’s patients, formed what is known as a “mistaken attachment” to a woman who was also a patient. In 1953, her husband was drafted into the U.S. She was buoyant and gracious when she fixed someone with her hazel eyes, there was no one else in the room.Ĭarrying on, no matter what, was her way. It was recently revealed that Sandra Day O’Connor’s husband, John, has struck up a romance with a fellow Alzheimer’s patient after moving into an assisted living center. Holding two family bibles, at center, is husband John J. In 2016, I watched her work a room of about 150 people at an awards dinner, and then respond to a toast from her friend, retired Justice David Souter. Sandra Day OConnor was an independent thinker shaped by the Arizona. The diagnosis of dementia came long before today’s announcement, in 2014, and although she began experiencing short-term memory loss, she showed few signs of failing. (Her nonprofit organization, iCivics, now reaches about 5 million middle schoolers a year with video games that teach the basic rules of civics.) ![]() Five years later, she was still going strong. She flew around the country speaking on behalf of judicial independence and promoting the teaching of civics to schoolchildren. Upon her retirement, O’Connor had told her friends that she had about five more years to continue to be relevant, to make an impact. Within six months, he was so far gone that she had to, very reluctantly, put him in a care facility. Sandra Day O'Connor and her husband John on their wedding day Credit: Courtesy of the O’Connor Family As O’Connor’s condition worsened over the next few years, Thomas writes, his neurologist told. He had sacrificed for her now, she said, it was her turn to sacrifice for him. In a painful irony, she left the Supreme Court, where she was often the decisive vote, in 2006 to take care of her husband, John, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s. “Her greatest fear,” her brother, Alan, told me for a biography I am writing on O’Connor, “was that she would get it.” The illness did not come as a surprise to O’Connor, whose mother and mother’s sister had suffered from Alzheimer’s. Retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced today that she was suffering from dementia, probably Alzheimer’s.
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