Tucson Weekly: Grumpy Old Men (December 17

Two Guys, Two Different Styles--And Death Marches On.
By Jeff Smith
AS GRUMPY OLD men go, my friend Jeff Dytko was precocious. By the time he reached his 50th birthday, he could be so cranky you were afraid to go out in public with him, lest he offend some innocent bystander with a knife and poor hand-eye coordination, and you ended up bleeding, just for being around.
Smith But I have to say--and this is a point of no small significance-- that I never heard Dytko utter an unkind word about Mo Udall.
As grumpy old men go, my friend Mo Udall was a complete failure. Not only did I never hear Mo utter an unkind word about Jeff Dytko, I can't recall him ever saying a mean thing about anybody. This point needs qualifying. There was a time, in 1978, when Mo was in one of the nastier biennial reelection campaigns for his seat in Congress, and his opponent--a political novice with a fundamentalist religious background, and the sort of self-righteous piety that goes with it--was attacking Mo's affability and easy-going political style as though they were venal sins. It was getting ugly, but none of the ugliness came from Udall or his staff. Mo wouldn't allow it.
But he had no hooks in me, and I was writing a column for the Tucson Citizen then, so I got mean with his opponent in print one Wednesday.
Mo happened into the newsroom the week after the column ran and he looked me up to thank me for the encouraging words. He'd been fighting Parkinson's disease for two years by that time, and coupled with the strain of a mean-spirited election campaign, it was beginning to show in his face. Anyway, he said, "Thanks for telling that horse's ass off.
Mo wasn't mean, but he knew one end of a horse from the other.
Jeff Dytko did too, and if he remarked upon more of the posterior portions of the world's equine population in his last months and years, he can be pardoned the dim view: It's tough to maintain a rosy outlook on life when life is choking the very breath out of you. Unlike Mo, who long ago slipped into unconsciousness just this side of death, Jeff Dytko had to spend years watching himself wither and virtually petrify.
The fact that he stayed alive and kept fighting makes him one of the toughest men I've ever known or even heard tell of, and I don't toss flattery like that around carelessly.
You've probably divined by now that Jeff Dytko, like Mo Udall, is dead. And like Mo, Jeff's escape cheers me. Neither one of them was particularly well-served by the long, slow manner of his leaving. The whole world knows that Morris K. Udall died last Saturday after nearly eight years lying in a coma, in a Washington, D.C., nursing home. A smaller, but fiercely partisan, circle of friends and family know that Jeffrey Nicholas Dytko took the same road out of town two days earlier, after a similarly lengthy battle with scleraderma. Both of them had the bad luck to blunder into fights with slow, inefficient, torturing killers.
Parkinson's is far the better known of the diseases that killed my friends last week, in part because it sickened and finally killed a man as famous as Mo Udall. Parkinson's slowly robs its victims of the use of their limbs. It attacks the central nervous system as the brain ceases producing dopamine. First the hands tremble and speech falters: ultimately nothing moves. Parkinson's is treatable in its early stages, and good work is being done with fetal brain tissue, but this still is controversial.
It was Mo Udall's misfortune to be physically strong, spiritually resolute, and politically connected. These resources allowed him to spend the last 22 years of his life as poster boy and whipping boy for Parkinson's disease--the last seven or eight of them as good as dead.
If there had been a plug to pull, I'm sure his family would have done
so.
Scleraderma is far less known. It's a disease of the surface tissues of the body. They lose their elasticity and gradually harden. Like Mo's Parkinson's, Jeff Dytko's scleraderma first showed in his hands. He was living in Flagstaff then, and the cold began to bother him. He was losing flexibility in his fingers, and the skin of his hand seemed to be pulled taut. He fled the cold and snow but he couldn't outrun the disease. Over a span of years it hardened the skin of his face and arms, his whole body--and then went to work on his lungs.
Jeff spent years fighting to get a decent breath, finally hauling around an oxygen bottle wherever he went. And he went.
He went with our friend Lincoln Thomas to Costa Rica, thinking that the sea air and warmth would do him good, maybe give him a few more years. Let us just say that it did not work out to perfection. There was this grumpiness thing, and then there's the matter of that whole Third World ambiance. Well, hey, you didn't read about it in the papers up till now; nobody got shot. He and Link got back to Tucson and started speaking civilly to one another again after just a few months.
Then Jeff rode up to Montana with Mike Kreppel to pick up an old truck. Dytko wasn't just going to sit home and die.
But ultimately that's what he had to do. The mobile oxygen got essentially immobile--too heavy to lug, too awkward to wheel--and Jeff was too weak to do much but watch football on TV and cough.
God, I'm glad he finally had the strength to let go. It took more guts to live as long as he did, the way he did, than I can imagine. But turning loose of life was the most powerful act of his life.
You may recall that it was Jeff Dytko who coined the term, "No matter where you go, there you are." When Mike Kreppel phoned last Thursday night to tell me Jeff had split, that was what he remembered.
"There he is," Mike said.
Bitching to Mo Udall about Bill Clinton.

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