Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. For years, I cared for Em, as she slowly turned to ashes and dust. I crumbled, too.

Mind you, I'm not sure I'm complaining. In many ways, being given an overwhelming task is a gift. Nietzsche said that which does not kill us makes us stronger. Hemmingway said when you're broken, you end up stronger at the broken places.

Before you buy what they had to say at face value, let me remind you that both Papa Hemmingway and Friedrich Nietzsche went crackers, and Hemmingway ended up swallowing a shotgun. Sometimes, you don't end up stronger at the broken places; sometimes, you just end up broken. I would not recommend finding yourself married to someone dying a long, slow death from an incurable illness.

On the other hand, I don't know how you avoid it, except to not marry.

Minor Surgery

I took Blondie to the hospital today, for a relatively minor surgical procedure. The surgeon said it was five minutes in the operating room, and an hour in the recovery room. Perhaps that was true, but I was waiting for two hours in a room of uncomfortable furniture and nothing to read. Give Headline News 30 minutes and they'll give you the world; give them two hours, and you'll be wishing you had Papa's shotgun.

So I engaged in self-pity, a practice I really don't commend to anyone, because it just makes you feel crappier. I knew that. I kept telling myself not to do it. I kept doing it anyway. I slapped myself on the wrist, telling myself to behave, but it didn't work.

I breathed a sigh of relief when Em was gone. Part of it was on Em's behalf. She was too good a woman to be subjected to that kind of misery. Part of it was for me, though. Finally, it's over, I thought. I'll never have to go through this again. But today, I kept thinking about something Em said, years ago. "You know, they told us in the gas crisis, that gas might eventually hit a dollar a gallon. But they never warned us that it would not only hit a dollar but keep on going up." I am once again married to a woman who is failing.

It Hasn't Changed Much

It isn't that what I do for her has changed all that much. She is forgetful and easily confused. She finds herself wondering what she was doing, so she looks around, and decides that the dishes need washed, or there is laundry that needs to be washed or she decides to head for her computer and play canasta. Eventually, she stumbles onto whatever she originally was trying to do, and she completes that task.

But she will ask me a question. "What day is it?" and I'll tell her. And she'll ask me again five times in the next fifteen minutes. I really shouldn't raise my voice at her. It's not like she rudely ignoring my answers. It's that she can't remember my answers. But I find myself getting annoyed at having to answer the same question, over and over again, and I raise my voice, and then she gets upset, and then I get upset. That's not the way my momma taught me to treat a stranger, and certainly not the way I ought to be treating someone I claim to care about.

Losing Her Freedom

The big thing, though, is her driver's license. She's really feeling trapped, that she can no longer drive. That means she can't go anywhere unless I go, and being agoraphobic, I really don't want to go, not ever. I think her feelings of impotence are more devastating than my agoraphobia.

She understands the burden that places on me, and she tries not to ask, and then feels pissed off that she is being constrained by my disability, and I understand the burden she's under, and I try really hard to accommodate her wishes, and then feel really pissed off that once again, I have a wife who is fading into the sunset.

Eating And Eating And Eating

She was NPO this morning, and I didn't want to have her smell cooking this morning, that would be cruel, so I stopped on the way to the hospital and grabbed a drive-thru breakfast sandwich and a large coffee. During the two hours I was in the waiting room, I spend 30 minutes in the hospital's cafeteria, eating a $4 baloney sandwich and drinking a $2 pepsi. And when we went home from the hospital, she asked if we could stop at McDonald's, then changed her mind and said no, we didn't have to.

We didn't have to? She knows I don't care much for McDonald's. On the other hand, she hadn't had anything to eat since the night before, and how could I deny her a Big Mac? I went there anyway, got a Filet-O-Fish and a vanilla shake, and she decided she really wanted my food and drink instead of the Big Mac, fries and Coke that she'd gotten. Increasingly, she's like a 3-year-old. But that's all right. I don't mind.

Catching Up On My Zees

And because I had fretted all night, and loaded up with coffee and then a bottle of Pepsi, I was really to collapse when I got home, so 30 minutes after we arrived, I closed my eyes and fell asleep in another 10 seconds.

That must have lasted all of 30 minutes before my panic-plagued wife woke me to ask me about what the surgeon had reported. I explained as best I could, and she immediately calmed down. It is so rewarding to see her calm down and smile. She's prettier without makeup than most women are with it. But I knew that in another 30 minutes, she'd wake me up again and ask me the same question. No point in arguing with the weather. I closed my eyes, and in ten seconds, I was again asleep. And so it went, lather, rinse, repeat, every 30 minutes for the next 2 hours.

One of the nice things about Old Timer's Syndrome, they say, is that you can hide your own Easter eggs. I'm finding out that vascular dementia is pretty much the same story. I can tell the same joke to Blondie five times a day, and she laughs each time as if she has never heard it before, and maybe that's because she hasn't. I told her that I really need another wife, not a replacement wife, but an additional wife, to help with the cooking and the cleaning, and helping to make the mortgage payments.

Dating A Twin

I was dating a nice woman before I met Blondie, someone whose life goals were entirely incompatible with my own, but she was pleasant company on lonely nights, and she was a sexual athlete. After 4 or 5 dates, I mentioned that my grandfather Harl had been a twin, and Em and I had stillborn twins as well, and she responded by mentioning that she was a twin as well.

I thought for a minute, and asked her if she thought her twin might be interested in a threesome. She said I wouldn't enjoy it. When she was little, she used to share a bed with her twin, and not only did he kick a lot, but he kept stealing the blankets. Fraternal, huh, I asked, and she laughed and nodded.

Something tells me, I said, that you've had this same conversation with other guys in the past. Yes, she said. It rarely takes more than 30 seconds to get from the point that she mentions she's a twin until her date suggests a threesome.

What doesn't kill you, it seems, makes you stronger. It's not a bad thing to remain weak.

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CNN Headline News - disability - driver's license - Filet-O-Fish - Friedrich Nietzsche - gas crisis - hospital food - panic - Papa Hemmingway - white matter disease