But my dapper husband （I used to describe his professional wardrobe, admiringly, as gay Mafia hit man） refused to wear anything but a T-shirt and baggy jeans, and he took early retirement from a job that I knew he could do in his sleep.
Early Retirement
Brian got his last job four years ago, as a university architect, by being Brian, as far as I can tell. He described a series of interviews, all kinds of questions about architecture, interior design, and collaborative work. He said he told the committee he was a team player （very true） and adaptable （not very true）。 He came home feeling that he’d nailed it, heard from someone on the interview committee that he had, and was hired twenty-four hours after the interview. Neither of us could tell, after a few months, exactly what the problems were. I wondered why he seemed to have such poor communication with the office manager and the administrative assistants and why he got such a cool response, after a month, from his boss, the woman who’d hired him with such enthusiasm.
He was disappointed and puzzled most days. He didn’t understand why so many things were going wrong. He enjoyed lunch in the dining hall and it sounded as if he spent a lot of time there, eating and being chummy with the dining hall manager. He told me about meetings with his boss, and I could hear that he had brought his great charm to bear in those meetings and had won reprieve after reprieve, but I couldn’t figure out what he had done—or not done—that required reprieves.
After a while, I stopped pressing him for details. I encouraged him to be extra-polite to the unhelpful and impatient office staff. It didn’t seem to help at all. By summer, he met regularly with his boss, to keep track of his projects, since he reported that she told him he’s “too slow.” His boss called him in to ask if he’s on any medication that might affect his concentration. We were both concerned and we both concluded that maybe the medication he was taking for pain （prior to his first hip replacement） was making him appear fuzzy, maybe making him fuzzy. We decided he should tell her about the pain medication and about scheduling his hip replacement for October. He told her and then told me that it went well.
He had his hip replacement and took eight weeks for his recovery. He stopped talking about life at the office and he didn’t seem very busy. The printer and the computers and the office protocol baffled him, and deadlines flew by. Before Christmas, his boss told him that his contract would not be renewed next April. She emphasized that he was not being fired, just not renewed. Brian understood, as I did, that he was being fired, nicely. He cleared out his office at the university and told everyone that he was taking early retirement. He told me that his boss was a bean counter.
Writing this, I’m amazed and disappointed in myself, blind in the bright light waiting another year and a half before we finally schedule the first appointment with the neurologist.
The neurologist brings us into the office, asks us some questions about Brian and his memory problems, gives him the mini-mental status exam, and then asks him to draw a clock. The instructions are: Please draw a clockface, placing all the numbers on it. Now set the time to 10 past 11. （Some places offer a pre-drawn circle, but that’s not as highly regarded an approach and it’s not what the neurologist does.）
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The maximum MMSE score is 30 points; 25 to 30 is a healthy person’s score; 20 to 24 suggests mild dementia, 13 to 20 suggests moderate dementia, and less than 12 indicates severe dementia. On average, the MMSE score of a person with Alzheimer’s declines about two to four points each year.
Brian gets a 23. Mild dementia.
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The neurologist asks Brian some other questions and asks me some questions, too, which I am sorry to have to answer in front of him. （Even in that office, my wish to minimize and normalize is hard to resist. But yes, I say, he does forget things, he does repeat things from one conversation earlier in the hour and again forty-five minutes later. Yes, he has complained of some trouble with his balance.） He struggles with the mini-mental exam. He knows who the president is. He can’t quite get the right month or season, and when he’s asked to count backward by 7s, he says, I’m never gonna be able to do that. After the first appointment, the neurologist sends Brian off for a bunch of blood work and she says, He’ll likely need an MRI. As we leave, the neurologist says, The MRI is necessary.
Ring the Bells
Meditation has been a great help to Brian, and therefore to me. My meditation is gardening, but Brian is old school and, after a long break from meditating, he’s back and has been going to a Yale mindfulness program for the last few years. He’s up and out the door at ten o’clock with the lunch I packed for him. He’s back an hour later. He went to the wrong place. He went to Madison, where there’s a meditation center he has visited a few times in the past, but the retreat today is in New Haven, at the usual Yale location. He’s upset with himself and says that he’s going to go upstairs and meditate. I tell him I’m sorry. I go outside and see that his car door is open. I close it and call out that I’m going to do a little gardening.
The next day, we go to a brunch nearby with old friends of Brian’s from Yale. I tend to be the calendar-keeper （because I give a shit, is why） and I have had to rush us out of the house to get to the eleven o’clock brunch, twenty minutes away. We both look nice. We’re looking forward to it—Brian to talk about Yale, past and present, and me because brunch is my favorite meal and the house is on the water. We drive up and there are no cars. The house is dark. Brian gets out and surveils. He even goes to the house next door—also dark. I check my phone. I have the right day of the week and the right time, but we are one month early.
I apologize several times, for rushing him as I often do, for messing up. He is as chill and relaxed and kind as a human can be. He laughs. He kisses me on the nose. He settles back in the passenger seat and says, “It’s a beautiful day. We’ve got no plans. The world is our oyster.” We decide that our preferred oyster is the diner up the road with the excellent sweet potato fries and Greek omelets, and that’s where we go. The view is the parking lot, the coffee is weak but hot, and my husband squeezes in next to me in the booth. The world is utterly our oyster for hours. （Ring the bells that still can ring, I know.）
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The next weekend are our back-to-back birthdays, June 18 and 19. I find that I can barely remember all the happy birthdays that I know we’ve had, because waves of grief knock them down. The waves of grief—which I had always thought of as representing a certain ebb and flow of feeling—turn out to be much more like actual waves, the big gray-green waves of the Atlantic Ocean. Thick, salty, consuming, and cunning, picking you up and throwing you down somewhere else, and you are not the better for it.
We are celebrating my birthday at a semi-swanky waterside restaurant. I am teary from the time the waiter pours our water. I weep behind the big menu. I go into the ladies’ room and cry some more. I come out and Brian is concerned but not upset or apologetic. I don’t know why I was crying so hard, so unstoppably. A few months ago, he got me a very expensive and very odd present, a hooded marled sweatshirt with tulle trim for five hundred dollars. I still don’t know what it was or why he bought it. I tend to wear black shirts and jeans. Sometimes navy shirts. Occasionally, white. In all of our years together, Brian—sensibly—never bought me anything with a ruffle, a flounce, or anything like tulle. I’m still surprised that I didn’t look at that sweatshirt and think, I see that you have Alzheimer’s. He had been giving me off-kilter cards, sequined hats on frolicking hamsters, for the last two years. His handwriting （architect-neat） was now all swerving block print, and the sentiments seemed rote and flat in one （you are so nice, sweet, funny, and beautiful）， and inside the other one, which I still cannot read without curling up, with grief and chagrin, it says: I promise to be kinder to you.