Transcript for the Piece Audio version of How Are You Who You Are?

VO What if someone you loved changed so completely that after a while you could barely recognize them? Would you still love them?

Music: Beethoven, Andante con veriazione

VO I grew up in Marblehead, Massachusetts, a classic old New England town known for its spectacular harbor and yacht clubs. We had our share of remarkable families, but the one I remember best were the Nadeaus. I'd met the son when I was in the sixth grade, and over time got to know his parents as well. Lynn was an award-winning math teacher and activist, and Doug was a prominent Boston attorney with degrees from Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. I'd never experienced anything like Doug and Lynn Nadeau: brilliant, successful, enlightened people whose large Victorian on the water was a social hub for family and friends. My own parents may have raised me, instilled their values and taught me how to live. The Nadeaus, they were rock stars.

VO On April 23, 2004, Doug Nadeau was running on the beach when he stopped breathing and collapsed. At the hospital, when doctors removed his clothes, they found women's underwear and a series of foam pads fastened to Doug's hips and chest. The story of how those pads got there, and how Doug died, is one I used to think of as a tragedy. But now I'm not so sure. Now I think it's a love story.

VO Lynn and Doug met in 1962, as grad students at Yale. When I asked Lynn about it, about the moment she laid eyes on Doug, the first thing she mentioned was what he wore.

LLN He walked into my life in puffy blue ski jacket. I was a grad student at Yale. I was doing what they called "Bells," which means one sat at desk at front door to see who came in who would be threatening women in the dormitory, when the door opened, and this blue puffy jacketed person walked in, when I challenged him, he said he was picking up the Times, wiggled it at me, gave me a smile out of corner of eye that turned me into a statue.

VO Even as a young man, Doug seemed to have everything mapped out. He knew what it took to be successful and what he needed to play the part.

LLN When he was in grad school, he wore nicest pair of brown corduroy pants, just the way a grad student would dress. Once we got to law school, or he got to law school, he bought a briefcase, got a suit, and wore it every day for three years.

VO After getting his bachelors at Princeton, and his Masters from Yale, Doug picked up his law degree at Harvard before joining a Boston firm. Quite an accomplishment for a guy who'd grown up in rural New Jersey and whose parents hadn't finished high school. Lynn told me that for Doug, being a strong, competent attorney was more than just a job. It was a path to the mainstream, to acceptance and the power structure.

LLN Doug I felt had an inner plan about how to live his life, he had decided what he wanted, turned out I fit into it. He decided to be a homeowner/have kids/be a successful lawyer, and I had signed up for program.

Music: Beethoven

VO Doug and Lynn married in 1963, and within four years they had two sons, Ted and Greg. In '68, they moved to Marblehead, where, from all accounts, Doug was a model citizen, husband, and dad.

VO The Nadeaus thrived in the '70s, with Lynn and Doug becoming active in state and local politics. Ted and Greg excelled in high school, and got into Princeton and Harvard, respectively. To the casual observer, this was a charmed family living a charmed life, and no year was better for them than 1985.

LLN It seemed as if it was the fruition of everything worked towards. We were 45 years old, our two sons had a good childhood and youth. Doug's career was doing wonderfully, he was an int'l lawyer traveling around world. I was poised to change high school math in country.

LLN Great shape, we ran 3 miles/morning on beach before work, and our lives were really perfect.

Music: Beethoven

LLN After the best year of lives, that spring our younger son had gone away to college, and we took a trip with group of lawyers to China/Japan/Korea, and while there Doug contracted a virus. When we returned, we couldn't figure out why he was always tired, and then he began showing neurological symptoms - eye blinking, head twisting, facial grimacing, eyes being plastered shut - and what Doug called the 'grayness of his personal winter' came down as we searched for answers to what he had and what could be done - he was diagnosed variously as having a stress problem - and ultimately it was diagnosed as Parkinsonian-like illness.

VO Doug's condition was caused by a lack of dopamine, a chemical that under normal circumstances is manufactured by your brain. For various reasons, Doug's brain couldn?t make dopamine, so the doctors loaded him up with medicine. But the drugs didn't last, and at night, Doug would lose his mobility, and end up confined to his bed, listening to classical music: Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, anything to soothe his restless mind.

VO Meanwhile, things at work were about to get a whole lot worse.

LLN His partners in the law firm closed the door, so that clients would not see this grimacing, peculiar, head-twisting person - and eventually one day they had taken his name off the front door and said they had come to an end of their ways, so Doug had to get another job with another firm, eating crackers to keep his eyes open so he would chew and that would keep his eyes open.

LLN He struggled and struggled to keep that competent, effective lawyer self - and in retrospect I see him clinging to that old self, the self he?d been all his life and worked toward, and having that self taken away from him bit by bit - and as he reached for it and tried to get back to it, he flirted with idea of taking on a new self.

Music: Beethoven

LLN In 1995 it looked as if he was going to be completely - he called himself a 'party vegetable' = he was going to be like a plant in corner - when we learned about a surgery called a pallidotomy, which he had in March '95 at MGH. That pallidotomy was a miracle, when he walked off the operating table into arms of family and friends we knew it was a miracle because he'd been reduced to the hospital bed before and after that there was such hope, we went to Sicily and walked to coast and Doug led the way - he thought he would get his life back again.

VO After the trip to Sicily, Doug was invited back to Princeton to receive its highest alumni honor, in recognition of having founded a Boston-based inner-city mentoring program. For the first time in years, things were looking up for the Nadeaus.

VO In order to tell the next part of the story, I have to rewind back a bit, to 1963. Lynn and Doug have just married and are living in Cambridge. It's late one night, and Doug comes to Lynn with a question.

LLN I was 8 months pregnant, it was dark in our bedroom - and Doug asked, "Lynn, did you ever wonder what it would like to be someone else?" And maybe that doesn't sound like a complicated sentence to you. But to me, the way he said it struck fear in my heart - what did he mean? Then he told me that he had a penchant for cross-dressing, wondered what would it be like to be a woman instead of a man - I was stunned, scared, disgusted, and, uh, confused, after all I was gonna have a baby in a month - and that's when he told me.

LLN What evolved, was that Doug explained to me that he'd cross-dress under stress - sort of a release, at the time sexual - that is, when he was young - and before he got sick, when he went on trips to, business trips and so forth, he would pack womens' clothes with him and if he were in a hotel by himself on business trip he would cross-dress - and I was disapproving, disgusted, all those various things but every now and then I tried to play along, I do remember once I thought, Oh, come on, Lynn, be open minded, entertain the thought, who would you be if you had been born male? I entertained the thought, Would I sit this way, would I do this, would I do that. It was trying to put in, it was the philosophical thought of... does gender create the being that we are? How are you who you are?

VO Okay, back to 1995. Lynn's been living with this secret for more than thirty years. Doug has this radical procedure designed to burn away neurons that aren't letting his medicine work - and initially, it's a success. But there's a catch. To tell you about that, here's Doug himself, speaking in the late 90s as part of a local cable documentary.

DAN Learned after operation, it has additional effect - reduces inhibitory neurons that deal with social conduct rather than just muscles - there's an effect that's been described to me as the effect of "disinhibition." People who have the operation become less inhibited as a result - I am one of four people being studied by neurologists at MGH - each of four of us has engaged in activities that we didn't do beforehand that have created issues in terms of families and friends

LLN There is a strong body of opinion in the literature that brain surgery did increase the disinhibitory functions and really pushed him into living life as a woman.

Music: Beethoven

VO Over time, Doug's surgery began to reverse itself, and his symptoms came back one by one. There was a second operation, then a third. The miracle, it seemed, was short-lived.

LLN It was harder for Doug to hope that the old Doug was really going to come back - soon after that he retired, wrote a letter to Boston bar saying he was giving up being a member, wrote he couldn't go to jury duty, and he actually gave up on parts of his life - and took up more of the rest of his life, including the cross-dressing.

VO Doug now considered himself a transgendered person named Donna. He began wearing womens' clothes more and more, forcing Lynn and the boys to rethink their notions of identity, and the factors that go into making us who we are.

LLN I guess he felt he had finished his job as a father who needed to keep up an image and decided to let them know the real him. I can't say it went well. I don't recall. They were not pleased to learn this about their father. They were not pleased to know father had kept secret from him, something that mattered so much. And they didn't value that secret. Cross-dressing? What a stupid thing to want to do. And I think it was hard for them to see their perfect father, and their image of who he was, so... so changed.

VO Doug meanwhile was going full tilt on the new identity. He joined several transgender groups, and began crafting female body parts out of foam pads so he'd look more womanly. Over time he turned his basement into a workshop, of sorts, which Greg said looked like something out of "Silence of the Lambs."

LLN Greg I think felt his father, his Donna father was killing his Doug father, and I felt that way too. Of course.

VO Just as Doug's role as a father had come to an end, he pretty much gave up on being a husband as well.

LLN He knew he was in a fight for his life, I think - and he was determined to live out his life in a way that was satisfying and kept him from despair - and he didn't care much about me - at that point he was trying to survive, and I was part of scenery. He did not see me as a helper who was concerned about his well-being - and I entertained the thought, How long can I go on in this peculiar crazy life? - I felt like I was living in a loony bin.

VO I asked Lynn about the quality of her connection with Doug, and how that changed over time. She said it wasn't the so much quality that changed, it was the quantity.

LLN It was when could we touch again and be connected, and those times became more and more infrequent, so that, at the end of his life, I don't, I hardly felt that we connected at all, and that was a great loss for me. Because by dint of my effort, I knew early that I could hold on to that string as he wandered into maze and I could pull, and we could be connected - and yet as hard as I pulled, all those years, eventually we could connect over the grandchildren or over a sunset or over some small or large matter more infrequently - and I clung to those, those moments.

Music: Beethoven

VO Their moments may have been few and far between, but Lynn never left Doug's side. Being his partner wasn't a matter of obligation, she says - it was about loving a man she'd come to understand like no other, even when he couldn't love her back.

LLN I truly, truly respected his desire to be who he wanted to be, so when I went with him to places, and I would meet strangers, I learned to say, Hello, my name is Lynn, this is my husband, he has Parkinson's so it's hard for him to talk, and he likes to be called Donna. And people were accepting, they called him Donna and talked about it later - but at least they treated him respectfully, and me respectfully, and I didn't have to hide - I didn't want to go through life pretending.

VO On July 4, 1999, I attended a party at the Nadeau's. Doug was there, his hair lighter, feathered almost. He was dressed in a frock, a faint trace of makeup around his eyes, his nails manicured and polished. We spoke at length. He was twitching and, unable to control his emotions, would occasionally burst into tears, even though the discussion was light, conversational. I was acutely aware of my girlfriend beside me, and what she was thinking. I looked around. Teddy's kids, Greg's friends, neighbors, parents - everyone was aware of Doug's presence, yet no one stared, or looked over their shoulder. Like Lynn, they'd come to accept him, and the identity he'd finally claimed as his own.

Music: Beethoven

VO The last time I saw Doug Nadeau, he was with Lynn, at the Marblehead Festival of Arts in summer 2003. He wore a dress, and unlike the experience at the house, this time he was in public, and people weren't looking with compassion. Sensing this, I walked up to Doug and shook his hand. The words that came out of my mouth were not what I would have said, had I thought about it in advance. They came from a good place, but they probably weren't what Doug wanted to hear. I said, "How are you, my boy?" It still hurts to think about it.

VO As always, Lynn was there. She either didn't notice the people around them, or she chose not to. The thing that struck me was how great it was to see them together in public. Lynn had supported Doug through everything, even the years when he'd decided that being a woman, and getting that right, was more important than being a father, or a husband. I think certain people would've let an illness and behavior like that take over their lives - Lynn chose to see it as an adventure.

LLN I think it was brilliant of Doug to save his life, his life force - he did spent two weeks being depressed during this 18 year period and I saw what depression was - it was terrifying to me to see him without a zest, without a goal, without a reason to wake up in the morning - I preferred the impossible, 'want it my way,' even if it's weird, the person who he became than a depressive who could not function.

VO On April 23, 2004, Doug suited up in his pads and went running on the beach, in order to get in shape for his life as a woman. He was scheduled to begin hormone treatments in a few weeks. But he never made it. He collapsed in the sand. And died three days later.

Music: Beethoven

VO Sometimes it seems like love is testing us. Like it's a dare, a chance to see if we?ve got what it takes to get through situations and stay the course.

LLN I was always afraid that if I were tried in some difficult situation I would just lay down and completely die and say I give up - but I learned I'm much more resilient than I thought I was - for me it was a great story. It's the story of my life.

VO In talking to Lynn over the years, I've asked myself, How would I act? Would I be as resilient? Or as constant? I can't say. But knowing Lynn and Doug Nadeau, I at least believe it's possible.

LLN Even now, as hard as life was, when I think, when people say to me, Oh, Lynn, now that he?s gone, you could date - I would never be interested in being with anyone else. Is that strange? It's strange for me. Doug was my, they use the word beshehrt, he was my beloved person - as impossible and difficult as he was, that?s who he was for me.

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