What is Love?
It’s amazing how I still wake up, and I find myself thinking
– he’s not here and he is not coming back. How can that be my waking thought? Yet
it is. Then I accept it and reluctantly get on with the day, while the memories
of his illness follow me. They pick on me like tormenting children, with
knives.
This morning I am full of the experience when I had to visit nursing homes to decide where he would go. I disliked the patronizing faces, the smell of urine, the coldness of the walls, even though they were decorated with cheap fake paintings of flowers and boats lit by a sunset. “And on Thursdays we play Bingo,” they would say. “In the summer, we sit on the patio.”
I hated it, every second. I should be choosing shirts, vacations, books for my husband, not a nursing home. He was fifty seven. Alzheimer’s disease had made him ageless, in a bad way. He had become Peter Pan’s grandfather. The boy, who couldn’t grow up, had grown up, and forgotten everything in five, very hard years.
I kept expe…
This morning I am full of the experience when I had to visit nursing homes to decide where he would go. I disliked the patronizing faces, the smell of urine, the coldness of the walls, even though they were decorated with cheap fake paintings of flowers and boats lit by a sunset. “And on Thursdays we play Bingo,” they would say. “In the summer, we sit on the patio.”
I hated it, every second. I should be choosing shirts, vacations, books for my husband, not a nursing home. He was fifty seven. Alzheimer’s disease had made him ageless, in a bad way. He had become Peter Pan’s grandfather. The boy, who couldn’t grow up, had grown up, and forgotten everything in five, very hard years.
I kept expe…