“Everybody thought it was a publicity stunt,” the puckish actual property mogul and Shark Tank producer/co-star says in the present day. “I just did it to shock the shit out of my friends. And they were shocked. If they had one moment of thinking I was dead it was worth it.”
That’s why, for her seventy fifth birthday this previous spring, Corcoran, whose reported internet price is $100 million, tried one thing a bit extra staid: She spent just a few days within the Cayman Islands with a gaggle of buddies—who all confirmed up dressed as her for a shock—and left it at that. “I couldn’t think of a better idea [than the funeral],” she admits. “I mean, that was competing against myself! And nothing sounded like as much fun.”
Nonetheless, don’t mistake her good humorousness to imply she’s at peace with getting older. She’s admittedly useless—and although she makes use of her media profession to justify the three facelifts she’s had (“Every 10 years!”) and simply shares about, she believes she would’ve had them anyway.
“A lot of my self-image is what I see in the mirror,” she tells Fortune. “So if I’m looking fresh and happy, I feel good about myself the whole day.”
She additionally has a extra critical preoccupation: that of growing Alzheimer’s illness.
“A couple of months ago, I found my phone in the freezer,” she admits. She was scared—and whereas a collection of cognitive checks together with her doctor confirmed she doesn’t have the illness, her worry of it’s comprehensible, contemplating it has affected two of her good buddies, her grandmother, and her mom, Florence, who died of Alzheimer’s 12 years in the past on the age of 88.
Corcoran is simply now popping out of a deep disappointment across the expertise of watching her mother disappear—a nine-year course of that was very powerful for about half of that point—and he or she’s keen to speak about it in case it might assist others.
“I think it took a long time to process it,” she says.
Coping with her mom’s Alzheimer’s
Her mother’s illness, she remembers, began with little issues: forgetfulness, shedding her glasses. However then she couldn’t keep in mind her greatest good friend’s title.
When she actually “got alarmed,” she remembers, is when her mom awakened in her youthful brother’s condominium after spending the evening and “she didn’t know where she was.”
That’s when Corcoran and her siblings—all 10 of them, raised by their dad and mom in a two-bedroom home in New Jersey—got here collectively to type a care workforce. Her brother T, she says, led the best way by signing as much as take a course on tips on how to look after folks with Alzheimer’s.
“He taught all of us how to care for her and we all got on the same page,” she says. “He taught all of us to live in mom’s reality.” So when she would scream about there being a snake beneath her mattress, for instance, reasonably than saying, “No there’s not,” somebody would go into the room, discover the snake and “beat the hell out of it.” The siblings would react equally when their mom requested for his or her father, who had died just a few years earlier than her sickness.
“We spent time saying, ‘Oh, sorry mom, dad has passed away,’ and she’d go through all the mourning for him again,” Corcoran says. “Then T called us one day and he said, ‘Dad’s out warming up the car.’ So we all started saying to her, ‘Dad’s out warming up the car.’” For a time, her mom even carried round a child doll, discovering happiness in her regression. They went together with it.
However watching her fade away, Corcoran remembers, was “just very sad, more than anything else. Because she, as a mom to us, was a love bug.”
Counting on household help
Discovering reinforcement in one another was essential. Whereas many siblings wind up preventing or coping with resentments as a result of some do greater than others whereas caring for an aged guardian, Corcoran says they have been fairly truthful about splitting up the duties.
“My job was to pay for everything,” she says. She additionally visited weekly together with her brother, whereas a sister lived throughout the road from their mother and remained on-call. One other sister was a hospice nurse, and bought to supervise their mother’s care as soon as she entered into hospice care. However, she provides, “There was one brother who just couldn’t take it. He couldn’t see my mother.”
Whereas aged parental caretaking so usually falls on daughters—one examine discovered that daughters present about twice as many month-to-month hours of care as sons—Corcoran provides her brother T a variety of credit score for taking the lead within the household. However that, she believes, is as a result of he’s homosexual.
“I love gay men, because they’re more sensitive,” she says, sharing that her brother would even go together with their mom’s delusion that he was their deceased father. “He held out his arms and said, ‘Florrie, baby,’ like my father used to. She thought he was Ed, that he was back, and he’d dance with her to old-fashioned music. That was sad.”
An older member of the sandwich era, Corcoran was elevating the children she had at 46 (by way of IVF with a sister’s eggs) and at 56 (by way of adoption) with husband Invoice Higgins all through her mom’s sickness—though she says they have been extra a supply of help than further stress. “Kids are more open minded and don’t get as depressed about it. They were not unhappy to go see grandmother,” she says about her son and daughter, who have been 18 and eight when she died.
Wanting again, Corcoran needs she had been a bit much less stoic when going by way of the lack of her mom—and advises others to not observe her lead.
“I’ve been through a lot where it’s been extremely emotionally and physically challenging for me to get to where I want to go, but I always felt like I should shore myself up and get on with it. I think it’s a gift to have,” she says. “But I’ll tell you that Alzheimer’s with my mother was really—especially the last four years—I felt sad and I think I was partially depressed. I probably should’ve seen a psychologist. I wanted to help care for her, but I felt burdened and sad. Everybody in the family did. So I think getting somebody to hold your hand is key.”
At the moment, she has buddies who’re coping with dad and mom with Alzheimer’s on their lonesome, which astounds her. “There are so many support groups out there,” she says. “It’s like AA, you know? There’s tons of support groups in every city. Get together and talk about it. That feels so good.” She recommends the web useful resource RecognizeAlzheimersAgitation.com, a marketing campaign she’s not too long ago partnered with.
Since her mom’s demise, Corcoran has additionally discovered loads about grief. “OK, it’s over. She rests in peace. She’s where she’s supposed to be,” she says, repeating the platitudes she stored listening to from others. “But I didn’t feel it,” she says, nonetheless lacking her in the present day.
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