University

June 28, 2014
 I have often said of myself that I am a sprinter, not a marathoner. I cannot tolerate uncertainty well or unfinished business. I tend to rush to conclusions to avoid the pain of long transitions. I get through tough appointments by imagining what a short duration they will be. Alzheimer's allows no such niceties. It has its own nasty, twisted rhythms and demands, without mercy, that you live by its own bizarre timeline. I am being schooled in the fine art of agonizing loss and betrayal, both by my life partner and myself. Everything is stripped away in your own soul and psyche. There is no place to hide. The principal of this school keeps a low drumming knell of the time it itself only knows , and the requirement of your attendance through it all. This taskmaster forces your head into the grindstone, without letting up, without allowing a breath. I have exhausted every aspect of denial and escape known to me. Nothing works. Currently he is housed, once again, in a medical facility for rehab following a recurrent infection. This time he also has an aspirational pneumonia to accompany his UTI. This, says the somber sounding physician of the moment, is a progression of the disease. This, he intones, indicates he is in the final stage of dementia. I don't care. I no longer listen, or run to google, or pick up the ever present books or pamphlets. I no longer go to meetings or seek elder care attorney advice. I do not follow the research or ask questions with scientific overtones. I no longer care. I don't follow the rules either. They put him on pureed food and thickened liquids. I sneak in real food, cut up fine in lots of gravy, butter, sauce and real coke and real strawberry malts. When they leave the room, I feed him. They tell me, as we walk the halls together, "I am sorry. You have to have one of us with you when you walk." I reply they should not be sorry. They should just join us. They often say they can't because they are busy. We keep on walking. They said he was eligible for hospice, so I put him in the car and took him to our lake. He didn't notice or care, but I did. I usually feel as if I am wearing the dunce cap, but I no longer care. They roll their eyes at my non compliance. I smile and keep on going. I may not graduate with honors, but I have learned to dance in the rain.

Garden of Life

The reason we are together for 50 years is that living with him has made me a better person than I am. He sees me as better than I actually am and he lives it...no matter what I say or do or how nasty I sound, he believes who I really am, not how I behave or talk at times. He has always believed in the good person he believes me to be, the good person he always saw, not the person I have always feared I was.  
I don't think I was originally "in love" with this man. Certainly not the way the media has taught us that love is. But I chose him. My biological clock recognized him and I reluctantly followed its yearnings. He was familiar and safe. He was pretty and comfortable. I knew him from another life somehow. I saw him. I leaned into the sunshine of his devotion and have lived in the warmth of that light for my entire life. I have suffered as his gaze grows blank and the light dims, blinks, and goes out. However, even now that I am gripped in shadow, I can still catch an occasional glimmer of that light peeking through the pall of this despicable disease. For respite I struggle in his garden. My fingers grow grey with grime, even inside the protective gloves. They ache as I pull relentlessly against the weeds, the infestations of garden decay. My back is screaming; my knees revolting against the demands placed on them. But without hesitation I continue to dig away at the intruders. It is a release to pit myself against an enemy I can see and I can respect. These weeds have long, strong roots. They thrive in highly unlikely places, small crannies, the sides of the brick path, in minuscule cracks. These weeds are survivors and are to be respected. Not so with the weedy ravages in his mind. This intruder is a savage whose aim is not to thrive but to destroy. I have no respect for its green tentacles that I watch choking the life from his brain. He can barely walk now. He rises only if I pull him up from a sitting position, his legs shaking, his body bent. He eats his tissue, his bib, his empty hands. Those hands remain in tight claw like configurations, grasping imaginary bits of a former life, clinging to what used to be. I pry open his fingers to let him hold a spoon, his tissue. Whatever had been in his hand falls in a trail behind him, unaware of their respective duties, forgotten in the miasma of his mind. I am so sad for him.. I hold him against me as often as I can, soothing as I did my children when they were small. Yet he shadows his caregiver now, not me. I have a funny mixture of responses to that phenomenon. It feels strange to see yet strangely comforting that someone else can make him feel even slightly peaceful and safe.

Specters

The ache is deep. The loss profound. Crying now amounts to bouts of low growls, a kind of gasping, like my guts might be falling out. Way beyond crying loudly, yet quieter. In fact it's more a quiet deep gasping for air, for faith, for strength. He has been hospitalized for a UTI and a subsequent stay at a rehab nursing home..."to recover his strength" before returning home. While he was in the hospital, I visited group homes as I struggled with the fact that he was becoming very difficult to care for at home. I felt the predictable mix of horror and relief as I considered these kinds of options but was not prepared for the actual horror I felt when I visited the homes. I came away determined to try longer to care for him myself. I just couldn't leave him in one of those places. My new resolve was severely tested in the rehab place where the predominant "therapy" for "returning him to strength" meant using strong psychotic and sedative drugs and injections and strapping him in a wheelchair. He left the center weaker than when he entered and barely awake. It took a day but he not only returned to full pre infection strength but also entered an unbelievable renaissance period of almost coherent language and socially appropriate interactions. We thoroughly enjoyed the respite and his company. I tried desperately not to jump on the roller coaster ride of hope, and sure enough, three days later the shadow of my husband replaced this new version. Now as the house quiets and the last of the caregivers leave, I am alone with him. This should be a relief to reclaim our own space, to be alone with each other. It is terrifying. So far he can't get out of his hospital bed but if he does, I have no idea with whom I will be dealing. My own sweet absent minded professor is long gone. This creature, this specter, with snarling fangs and drooling lips, comes at me with fists curled, spitting venomous gibberish into the air. I am afraid of the dark.

Transitions

My chest aches. My heart hurts. I wonder sometimes if my age and lack of diligence about my health is catching up to me. I wonder if I am feeling the beginnings of my end. Hard to figure out because my heart is actually broken. The losses keep rolling in, like the tides, with no respect for the beaches' capacity to tolerate or accommodate them. Inexorably, relentlessly, wave after wave of grief. Eroding the sands of the protective reef around my heart. I was tolerating, if not accepting, the unspeakable horror show of my husband's slow demise, but now my beautiful son-in-law seems to be leaving me as well. My heat aches also of course for my my own baby, his wife, but I feel the pain of his withdrawal personally. Another of the many fine men in my life who always always always leave me. At least that's the life lesson I am drawing from all this. Festive pity party up in here? Absolutely. And yet.....as the season softens into spring and the snow melts away to a cold distant memory, my heart is thawing towards my husband. I find myself not so angry with him any more, though, like the last small mound of dirty snow next to our driveway, I still get irritated and impatient with the ravages of his disease. That one small dirty mound of cold is still present, but no longer rules my heart. I feel the inescapable pull of spring's promise and the renewed sense of life force that the budding season allows. Now I feel more sad for him, for his loss. I have been raging for years over the loss this represents for me, and now as I lean back toward him again, my pain is for him, not me.

Journeys

I find myself at sea, tossed gently among the pearls of the South Pacific islands. The air is gentle and smells vaguely of jasmine or gardenia, even out at sea. I feel rested and relaxed, an unusual feeling for me these days. As always, after the second guessing and the resistance, I am always always glad to go, to be free, to adventure. This is what we should both be feeling. The flip side of this pleasure is the bad twin of sorrow...for him not to experience this and for me not to have him. "Everything is the same. Everything is different." Wisdom from a friend whose husband just died from this disorder as she described her days. These days he sits and stares, down at his hands, the floor, his lap. He fingers restlessly the edges of his pants, his bib, his fingers curled as if they hold something precious. He scrapes his spoon slowly over his plate, imagining gourmet meals and gooey, delicious concoctions, though there is nothing there yet. What do those vacant blank stares see? Those formerly warm, shoe button eyes, I called them....turned to dark discs of no one home. He asks tonelessly, in muttering gibberish, about the animals he sees, when there are none. My raging has abated somewhat and my actual sadness has increased. Dare I trust that I am gently sliding into the acceptance of this nightmare? I seem better equipped to figure out his needs, and mine, these days. I am planning for my own life, my respite, my fun. I am trying to care for him in such a way that he can find some pleasure in what is left of his days. Our daughter made a collection of her music and got him large acoustic earphones with which to listen. He shuffles around the house, his ears encased in the huge earphones, an occasional grin breaking through the Parkinsonian lack of affect. He will mutter, if you catch him grinning, "My daughter!"

Blind Side

I thought I was angry. I was. I thought I was done. I was. What I didn't expect was the force of love, the strength of our tie, the longing for what we were. He is still here, but these waves of grief feel new and are huge. Perhaps it is the daily grind relief I get from my new helper; maybe it is the sudden intense interaction I am getting from all the palliative care workers who have been in and out of our house. Whatever it is, I am freer to feel the loss and to appreciate this man...not for what the witch Alzheimer's has left behind so far, but for the positive beam of love that my husband has directed at me for 50 years. I looked into his lost, dear, familiar face after dinner tonight and the anger melted away. I took him gently into an embrace. He clung to me, lost still and shaky, but there, as he always has been. Tonight, from the fog of dementia and the stumbling steps of Parkinson's, he returned from his bed to tell me that he loved me. He loves me. He can't put on shoes, and he can't brush his teeth, and he can't wipe his bottom, but his love for me is still evident to him. The lessons here are gigantic. I haven't figured them all out, let alone mastered anything, but they are clear to me. Love is everything. I guess it always has been.

The Great Wall

China or not, I have hit it. It is monstrous and it is final. I can't do this any more. I have no control over my emotions. Perhaps I waited too long to seek help, to put my own oxygen mask on in this bumpy ride, but in any case the rarified atmosphere of poopaloosa has finished me off. I am no sissy when it comes to waste management. Poop and I have been on intimate terms my entire life, through lots of children and all kinds of animals. But the final straw feeling of your life partner un-developing, unraveling skills and controls in reverse order that we learn them from birth to maturity trumps all that. It felt real final to me when we began that part of this journey in August of this year. My daughter's best friend in high school was murdered by a serial killer in their senior year of high school. A freak horror show of a coincidence which took the life of a dear and talented girl and changed the lives of all of us forever. My daughter had put her trust in this relationship going forward into the next stage of life together. Her sister, my youngest child, was so traumatized by it she developed serious panic and claustrophobic traits which haunted her into her adult life. At Holly's memorial service we stayed close to her parents as we didn't know a lot of others and felt closest to them, most LIKE them. Frankly it gave our daughter comfort to be near them also, as if she were somehow near Holly herself. At that service Holly's dad kept manically stating, over and over again, how everything would be exactly the same. That he would come see all the kids' plays at school, that nothing would be different. Each time he said it, it came out clearer and louder and made the sensitives among us cringe more and more. We all knew that NOTHING would EVER be the same again, for him or for any of us there. We all also understood the kind of pain that would have to cloak itself in that kind of full metal jacket bravado and denial. It is this kind of bravado I have been dealing with in myself. The truth is I don't think I have an entire year in me before I need full time all the time help for him. I am cooked now. I am done for. I do not have capacity for green eggs and ham my Sam. I will visit a lot and love you if you let me, but I have to go. I have to be free. I must go. For the first time I am thinking these thoughts coherently. I am not just roaring the pain and anguish. Tiny little threads of thoughts, ideas, pre-plans are beginning to form. Unthinkable before now, I wonder actively where I can have him live so his children, all his children, can gain ready access to him. I will not live forever and I will not live very much longer in fact if I dont make some serious changes. For this very time, right now, I am planning more coverage and help for home and more getaway time for me. I feel like a tourist at this wall, peeking over it into the forbidden city. We shall see for how long that works.