Love, Dementia, and the Reality of "For Better or Worse"

Jay Leno’s story shows that “for better or worse” isn't just a vow—it’s a reality. Explore the quiet devotion of caregiving and love in the face of dementia. https://bit.ly/4uCKH23

In this Episode:

• 00:00 - Intro: The Reality of "Showing Up" in Dementia Care
• 02:21 - Denisa Lady Newborough: 14 Languages, 5 "Shareholders," and One Extraordinary Life: A look at the audacious life of a high-society rebel.
• 02:45 - Uncle Louie’s Chicken Wings Marinara: A recipe for a crowd, straight from the Leno family archives.
• 07:54 - More than Words, For Better or Worse: A deep dive into Jay and Mavis Leno’s 45-year journey through the "tide" of dementia.
• 12:27 - The Millions of Unseen Caregivers: Recognizing the quiet labor of love performed by 50 to 60 million Americans every day.
• 14:36 - A Tribute to Greg: Honoring a community member’s legacy and his final reflections on finding peace caring for his wife with memory loss.
• 16:38 - Outro: Every Day is a Gift

#DementiaCare #CaregiverLife #AlzheimersAwareness #EndOfLifeCare #GriefSupport #CaregiverSupport #LoveAndLoss #MarriageGoalsRealLife #AgingParents #SeriousIllness #HospiceEducation #EveryoneDiesPodcast #EveryDayIsAGift #JayLeno

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Everyone Dies. Relax and settle in for our podcast about serious illness, dying, death, and bereavement. Because even though everyone dies, no one must face it unprepared.

This week we're talking about what love looks like when memory fades, about caregiving, grief that repeats itself, and about the quiet, relentless devotion happening in homes everywhere. Because this is not just one story. There are millions of people right now caring for someone who may no longer remember yesterday, but still feels the love today.

And they keep showing up every single day. I'm Marianne Matzo, a nurse practitioner, and I use my experience from working as a nurse for 47 years to help answer your questions about what happens at the end of life. And I'm Charlie Navarrette, an actor in New York City, and here to offer an every-person viewpoint to our podcast.

We're both here because we believe that the more you know, the better prepared you are to make difficult decisions. And please remember that this podcast does not provide medical or legal advice. Please listen to the complete disclosure at the end of the recording.

In the first half, Charlie has Denise and Lady Newboro's obituary and our recipe of the week. In the second half, I have an essay about Jay and Mavis Leno and their life living with dementia. And in our third half, Charlie has a post from our friend Greg on Facebook.

So Charles, how are you? Well, I'm fine. I would like to report something, but nothing is new right now. I'm thinking.

You had your colonoscopy? Thinking. No, it is, hang on, where are we? I'm scheduled next Tuesday, Wednesday. You have been saying that for like two months now.

No, no, no. I think it's closer to six weeks. But yes, it is coming, in a manner of speaking.

Yes. And I have a friend who will, he'll accompany me there and, you know, afterwards we'll go get some pancakes for breakfast. Well, that'll be good.

You'll be hungry after all of that. Yes. So, our first half, our recipe this week is Jay Leno's Uncle Louie's Chicken Wings Marinara.

According to Jay, my uncle always told me someday you'll have to make dinner for 20 guys and this is what you'll make. We're sure your next funeral lunch attendees will agree. Mangiamo.

And speaking of spicy, our obituary of Denisa Lady Newborough is from the book of obituaries by High Massingbird. Denisa Lady Newborough, who has died aged 79, was many things. Wire walker, nightclub girl, nude dancer, air pilot.

She only refused to be two things, a whore and a spy. And there were attempts to make me both, she once wrote. She was also a milliner, a perfumer, and an antiques dealer.

But her real metier, in early life at least, was what she called profitable romance. Her opinions on the subject of presents from gentlemen would have done credit to the pen of Anita Luce. I have never believed that jewels, any more than motor cars, can be called vulgar just because they are gigantic.

Her admirers included the kings of Spain and Bulgaria. Adolf Hitler, whose virility she doubted. Benito Mussolini, whom she described as a gigolo.

And Sheik Bengana, who gave her 500 sheep. When she lived in Paris, she had no fewer than five protectors, all shareholders as she termed them, and persuaded each, who was ignorant of his fellows, to part with a flat or a house. She was earlier married to Jean Malpiche, the governor of Laos, who had died.

But the climax of this stage of her career came in 1939, with her marriage to the 61-year-old 5th Lord Nubero as his second wife. They were divorced in 1947. Denisa Josephine Braun was born on April Fool's Day, 1913, in Subotica, Serbia.

In her early teens, she ran away to Budapest, where for a time she slept under bridges with tramps. Then, styling herself Baron de Bronze, she became a nude dancer and mistress of bowers, including a pair of twins. A decade of adventures followed in Sofia, Bucharest, Paris, St. Moritz, and Berlin.

She spoke 14 languages. She served as a transport officer with the Red Cross at the beginning of the Second World War, but was dismissed in 1941 because she was not of British birth. In 1946, shortly before her divorce from Tommy Nubero, a receiving order was made against her for debts of £951, which she attributed to losses at bridge when her skill had been impaired by unhappiness.

She recovered her finances by designing outrageous hats. The nicotine hat, for example, which was covered with cigarettes with half-smoked imitations hanging over the bridge. In 1959, she published an autobiography, The Fire in My Blood, the flavor of which may be surmised from such chapter headings as Gypsy Love, Elegant Sin in Bucharest, and On the Trail of the White Slavers.

She was convicted in 1964 of permitting her masonette in Davies Street to be used for the purpose of habitual prostitution, though her conviction was squashed on appeal. Lady Nubero was a great beauty, and she was charming and funny. By conventional standards, her morality matched her flaming red hair, but she remained as proud of the one as of the other.

She is survived by her daughter Juno, who was married to a dentist. Only a daughter of a woman like that would be married to a dentist. Yes, I love that.

Talk about a daughter rejecting a mother's life. Oh, dear. Please stay tuned to our webpage for this week's recipe and additional resources for this program.

This is the part where we ask for your financial support. Your tax-deductible gift will go directly to supporting our non-profit journalism so that we can remain accessible to everyone. You can donate at www.everyonedies.org. That's every, the number one dies.org, or at our site on Patreon under Everyone Dies.

Marianne? Thanks, Charlie. Leno's wife Mavis woke up every single morning for three years believing her mother had just died. And every single morning, he held her while she cried, and then he got up and made her breakfast, and then he came back the next day and did it again.

They've been married for more than 45 years. She's not a footnote in his story. Before dementia began taking pieces of her, she was a woman who spent years fighting for women living under Taliban rule in Afghanistan, worked serious enough to place her among those considered for the Nobel Peace Prize.

She traveled. She was curious. She had opinions loud enough to make themselves heard across her room.

Jay Leno, for all his decades of fame and all those millions of viewers, has said plainly that she was always the more interesting one. In 2024, Jay filed for legal conservatorship over her estate. The diagnosis was advanced dementia.

The disease had progressed to the point where she could no longer manage her own affairs. He did not hide this. He talked about it in interviews with the specific careful language of a man who's had a long time to find the right words for something that does not have any.

Here's what the disease took first. The restaurants they loved. The travels she lived for.

The long evening conversations that had been the architecture of their life together for decades. Dementia does not arrive like a sudden flood. It arrives like a tide that keeps coming in and each time it pulls back.

Something that was there before is simply gone and you learn not to look for it. The mornings were the hardest part. Every day without fail, Mavis would wake up with the news of her mother's death would arrive fresh in her mind as though she were hearing it for the first time.

Not a memory, an event happening now. She would cry the way you cry when someone you love had just died which is because in every way that her mind could register someone she loved had just died. Jay would hold her through it.

He would stay until it passed and then the next morning the tide would come again and he would hold her through it again. This continued for approximately three years. He does not describe this as a sacrifice.

He describes it as a marriage. He has arranged the architecture of his professional life around her needs. He takes only work that allows him to be home the same day or at the furthest rush one night away.

He comes home every evening and cooks her dinner. They watch television together, animal programs, and travel documentaries on YouTube because the real travel is gone but the appetite for the world is still somewhere in there and he feeds it with what he has available. When he carries her to the bathroom he has a name for it.

He calls it Jay and Mavis at the prom. The two of them moving together down the hallway slowly and carefully he makes it a dance and she thinks it's funny. She laughs.

He makes her laugh every day deliberately as though it's an item on a list of things that must be done before the day is finished. She still knows who he is. When he walks into the room she smiles.

She tells him she loves him. There's still fire in her he says. She still growls at the television when something offends her.

The woman is still in there accessible in the ways that matter most and he's paying attention to every single one of them. Someone asked him whether he was going to get a girlfriend now. He said he already had one.

He talked about the vows, the specific words for better or for worse. He said that most people who say those words on their wedding day are quietly hoping the worst never actually shows up. They mean it when they say it but they say it on a beautiful day in a beautiful place with everyone they love watching and the worst feels very far and slightly abstract and not entirely real.

For Jay Leno the worst showed up and he's doing what he said he would do. He says he hopes his story turns a light on just not toward him but toward the 50 or 60 million Americans who are doing exactly what he's doing right now today completely without recognition. They are caring for a parent, a spouse, a sibling, a person who once knew their own name and sometimes no longer does.

Nobody's interviewing them. Nobody's writing posts about them. They're just showing up every morning for someone who needs them to show up because that is the whole definition of what they promised.

For better or worse is not a line in a ceremony. It is what you do on a Tuesday evening when you carry the person you love down a hallway and call it the prom just to make her smile one more time before the day ends. I knew this about Leno but it reminds me, you know, we spoke a few episodes ago about the British actor Richard Grant and how, you know, he and his daughter but especially Richard just looked after his wife who was in a, you know, became ill and died and, you know, they just adored each other and treated each other the way you described with Leno and his wife.

And on the other hand, I'm sorry, some idiot said to him, oh, you're going to get a girlfriend now? That, I mean, how could you tell, you know, someone that, oh, you're going to go get a girlfriend now, you know, because your life has dementia? Well, I don't know if it's part of a Hollywood group or if someone was kidding him. I don't know. But he talked about it in an interview.

So somebody must have said it to him. Oh, yeah, I'm sure they did. But, you know, you're right.

In the interview, who knows, maybe it was meant as a joke, but. You know how those guys talk when they get together. Yes, I do.

I do. For our third half, over the past few years, we have been sharing Facebook posts written by Greg, whose girlfriend since grade school, who was also his wife, lived in a memory care center with Alzheimer's disease. He offered us an inside look at his life and his daily visits to his girlfriend.

She died a few months ago, and we found out that Greg died suddenly in early April. Rest in peace, Greg. This is a post from Greg from the end of 2025.

Do you have everything you want in life? Most of us do not. But my wife did over her last year on this journey of dementia. She no longer remembered her old home, her furniture, her favorite foods, or that she'd like to go for car rides in the fall to look at pretty leaves.

She had all she wanted. In the early stages, I wanted a cure. I wanted her to laugh and dance.

I wanted her to get no worse than she was. I think she wanted those things too early on. But I prayed every day for the Lord to grant her peace and contentment, and she received it.

I want you to look at this picture closely. She has a very firm grip on my hand. I sit at her bedside and tell her stories and remind her of things we had done when we were younger.

She has a beautiful picture on TV playing some relaxing and soothing music. She has her baby Benji. She has Teddy.

She has a man that's her with all his heart. She has no fear, no anxiety. She is totally at peace.

She has everything she wants, literally everything she wants. I was blessed because she was blessed. Please stay tuned for the continuing saga of Everyone Dies, and thank you for listening.

You can find more episodes from our series about grief on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast app. Follow and subscribe to the show. Share it with a loved one or a friend living with dementia who needs a little hope today.

This is Charlie Navarrete, and from 62-year-old comedian David Cross, now I'm dying, not from a disease that I know about, but I am in the fourth quarter. And I'm Marianne Matzo, and we'll see you next week. Remember, every day is a gift.

This podcast does not provide medical advice. All discussion on this podcast, such as treatments, dosages, outcomes, charts, patient profiles, advice, messages, and any other discussion are for informational purposes only and are not a substitute for professional medical advice or Always seek the advice of your primary care practitioner or other qualified health providers with any questions that you may have regarding your health. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard from this podcast.

If you think you may have a medical emergency, call your doctor or 911 immediately. Everyone Dies does not recommend or endorse any specific tests, practitioners, products, procedures, opinions, or other information that may be mentioned in this podcast. Reliance on any information provided in this podcast by persons appearing on this podcast at the invitation of Everyone Dies or by other members is solely at your own risk.