Chris

April 5, 2019The first week of each month rolls around, and I anxiously await the weigh-in. The caregivers continue to feed him double portions plus Ensure. He's apparently burning a lot of calories, though that's hard to imagine, especially given the snail's pace at which he walks. It could be a minor blip, or last month's weight might have been off a bit, or the weigh-in wasn't exactly accurate.

I'm just not sure how to do that without having a pity party, but I'll try:Alzheimer's is an "awful, terrible, no good, very bad" disease (hat tip to Judith Viorst's excellent). We'd thought about perhaps taking six months to travel from town to town and state to state (we live in the United States), renewing friendships with old friends who have moved away, seeing the beautiful sights along the way, enjoying each other's company, relaxing together, perhaps seeing again the places we'd particularly loved over the years. Dreams where we walked along the coast in Ireland and visited ancestral villages in England and sat, hand-in-hand, at a little cafe in Paris while contemplating a trip to New Zealand or Bora Bora or other exotic locations. Even if, at some point, I were to be able to travel to every fantastic place in the world, do all sorts of phenomenal things, take thousands of photos, and write hundreds of blog posts, it just wouldn't be the same without my beloved.

You don't want him to miss another deadline. This goes on for several months or maybe it was a couple of years, incrementally more and more, until you're actually helping with spreadsheets and reports that he isn't "able to get to" because of "the work load. You wonder why he doesn't seem to be able to get this stuff done and keeps calling you at work with Excel questions, but still you haven't figured out that there's a real problem. You breathe a sigh of relief, but not for long; because, he might have survived the PIP, but the next person RIF'd (reduction in force) will probably be him.

March 27, 2019It's been one year since I drove my husband to a care facility in Napa for a one-month respite stay. Or maybe it's more accurate to say you don't notice the temperature of the water in the pot going up bit by bit until it starts boiling. It has taken a year for me to start getting any semblance of sleep pattern back, though sleep is still sketchy at times. I finally, just a couple of months ago and at the insistence of my children, started physical therapy for the injury to my arm that was exacerbated by repeated twists and pulls and yanks and pushes and grabs.