Novelist Melody Carlson drew from her family’s FTD story to write her latest book, Welcome to the Honey B & B, which will be released on March 4 by Baker Publishing Group. In the following article, she describes her late husband’s road to getting an FTD diagnosis and explains why she built a novel around this difficult chapter in their lives.
As a novelist, I’m frequently asked about the “story behind the story,” and I usually admit that most, if not all, my novels have snippets excerpted from real life. Sometimes they’re from other people’s lives and sometimes my own. But Welcome to the Honey B & B is perhaps the most autobiographical story I have written. My initial motivation behind it was to show readers, through story, what living with FTD was really like.
My husband Chris was a youthful 64 when he began showing serious signs of memory loss and confusion. He looked fit and healthy, but in the midst of building a house in 2020, he started to lose it. After years of home builds and remodels, he became muddled and confused over the simplest tasks, so much so that I had to take breaks from writing just to organize him and eventually work side by side with him. This project was meant to be our “final home,” where we would live out our happy, golden retirement years together, but just getting done became a challenge.
Distracted by COVID, house-building, the filming of my new movie, and my mother’s illness and subsequent death, I put my concerns about Chris’s lapses of forgetfulness and changed behavior on the backburner. And, of course, he always claimed he was “just fine.” But by 2022, after we moved into our new home and he severed his thumb on a table saw, I realized something was really wrong. And an evaluation from our health care provider confirmed Chris’s short-term memory was compromised.
Being the optimistic problem solver, I began our journey of getting better hearing aids, trying new memory-enhancing nutrients, checking for sleep apnea, and even trying a machine that drove us both crazy. He got a spinal tap pressure check to be sure it wasn’t hydrocephalous. And finally in late November 2022, our neurologist read Chris’s MRI and CT scans. He pointed out where the brain was literally sinking into itself, and glumly informed us that “it looks like FTD, which has no treatment.” He did recommend physical therapy, then sent us on our way.
Not knowing what FTD was, but suspecting this wasn’t good news, we went home. Chris wanted to watch The Sound of Music that evening and, although I reminded him he usually fell asleep by the time Maria sang “My Favorite Things,” I slid in the DVD. As he often did, Chris asked about actors in the movie. “Are the kids still alive?” As usual, I checked on my phone. Starting with the oldest, the pretty girl who played Liesl, I was surprised to see she’d died . . . from FTD.
I looked up at Chris, relieved to see he had fallen asleep even before “My Favorite Things.” And so, as the movie merrily played, I researched FTD on the internet and began to educate myself. It was not good news. Fast-acting dementia, early onset, memory loss, personality change, mobility issues . . . and average life expectancy was 7-9 years after symptoms show, but could be less. By then I knew, thanks to retrospect, that he’d shown signs in his early sixties. But I’d chalked them up to aging, stress, and his general goofy sense of humor. Yet for all I knew, he could’ve been five years into it. That was the first night I cried over it . . . cried hard.
Knowing life as we knew it was about to start changing, and fast, I wanted his family and friends to know what was coming. After all, how much time would he have left to be with them? How long would he remember who was who? Or even care? So I started informing others. But every time I mentioned “FTD” I was met with a blank stare or silence. No one seemed to know what it was. Bruce Willis had just been diagnosed, so I used him as my example. After all, Bruce was the same age as Chris, and Chris was a Die Hard fan. But I continued to get questions about FTD . . . tough questions, emotional questions, answerless questions.
So I decided to write a novel to inform people about FTD. It wasn’t my first time crafting true-to-life fiction. But it was probably the most challenging. I was, in essence, writing our story. CT, the character living with an FTD diagnosis, was very much like Chris, while Honey, the wife caring for him, was similar to me. And I wanted the story to be as honest as possible. For one thing, it was good therapy for me—to tell it like it is. But I knew it would be a good tool too.
Welcome to the Honey B & B releases March 4, seventy-two days after Chris died in our own home, just three days before Christmas and his 68th birthday. He lived his life as fully as possible, still connecting with loved ones, maintaining his cheerful spirit, but FTD was relentless. And as much as I miss him, I know he’s better off in the next life. Whole and healed and freed from the grasp of FTD’s stranglehold. Chris was a genuinely good man, and always my biggest fan—literally, since he was 6’6”, but in every other way too. He’s probably up there right now, cheering to see this book in print!
Melody Carlson is the award-winning author of more than 250 books with sales of more than 7.5 million, including many bestselling Christmas novellas, young adult titles, and contemporary romances. She received a Romantic Times Career Achievement Award, her novel All Summer Long has been made into a Hallmark movie, and the movie based on her novel The Happy Camper premiered on UPtv in 2023. She and her family live in central Oregon.
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