PENSACOLA, Fla. — At the kitchen table of their rental condo, Dick and Kathy McCaskill bent over an elaborate star in an adult coloring book. Kathy, 77, picked up a dark blue pencil and laughed. “We love to do this,” she said. “I married a blue girl,” Dick, 76, replied. Coloring soothes Kathy’s anxiety and helps stimulate her thinking as she lives with dementia.
Their grandson, Colby McCaskill, visiting from New York while finishing his senior year at Fordham University, grabbed a gold pencil and joined them. He asked how long they’d been working on the page; Kathy laughed and said she’d been at it a long time and that she loved doing it. Those quiet, ordinary moments felt both familiar and new — echoes of the childhood afternoons when the grandparents colored with Colby, and reminders of how much has changed as the couple now faces cancer and dementia.
To sort through his feelings, Colby recorded an audio letter to his grandfather called Dear Papa. He opens it by saying he wishes his grandparents weren’t growing so old, and he names dementia plainly throughout the episode. He weaves together visits, interviews and personal reflections, confronting the small but telling lapses in memory: Kathy forgetting names and her age, losing track of a task she was about to start. When Colby asks how she is feeling, Kathy says she begins to say something and then can’t remember it — a revelation she finds a little scary. At one point she guesses she is “47 years old.”
The podcast won the grand prize in NPR’s College Podcast Challenge. Judges praised its intimacy and vulnerability and how it captured a family learning to talk about hard things.
Hearing his own voice talk about their lives felt different to Dick. “I’ve listened to it four or five times, and it brings tears every time,” he said. After listening together on their screened porch overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway, the three of them sat close and held hands.
Naming the condition mattered. As Dick put it, hearing the word dementia was like a cold cup of water “thrown in your face” — a jolt that made the reality undeniable. Despite the difficulty, the story Colby recorded is also an enduring love story. Kathy struggles with everyday tasks — she may know how to turn an electric toothbrush on but not off, or she will start a faucet and then forget to turn it off. Those frustrations have become lessons in patience for Dick. “My daily prayer is, ‘Lord, give me more patience,'” he said. Their faith has become a steady comfort: Kathy often says, “The Lord knows it all,” and Dick answers, “Yes, darling. That’s right. Healthy, happy and wise.”
Colby captured moments of tenderness: Dick pausing to help Kathy remember, waiting patiently and gently bringing her back. “I would have thought this kind of change would emotionally isolate you from her,” Colby says in the episode. Dick replies that, on many levels, the relationship has grown “better and sweeter.”
Before making the podcast, Colby avoided talking about his grandparents’ health. He worried that without a medical fix, raising the subject would only bring sadness. Dick, too, had been reluctant to burden his grandson, who is nearly 50 years younger. Recording the podcast opened a door. It became a starting point for conversations about aging, loss and mortality that the family had not had before. It gave Colby a way to express his fears and love, and it gave his grandparents a chance to share how they feel. “The ideal outcome was that I get to tell my grandparents how I feel, and they listen, and they get to tell me how they feel, and I listen,” he said — and he felt that, ultimately, that happened.
Edited by Nirvi Shah and Steve Drummond
Visual design and development by LA Johnson