I have failed him.
Better to Be Lucky The good days still have sweetness. If I can’t fall asleep quickly, I ask Brian if I can spoon him and he lies on his right side and I spoon him and sometimes, like the old days （three years ago）， I slide my hand under his T-shirt and take in his amazingly smooth skin and his smell, which hasn’t changed: wood and cinnamon. I lie on his shoulder and we watch an incomprehensible Scottish mystery. I fall asleep during a crucial ten minutes and when I wake up Brian tells me why the rocking chair or convertible or chicken coop is covered in blood. We eat a couple of cookies in bed and I point out that there’s been a change （not a bad thing but still…） in Rachel Maddow’s lip gloss and he admires my keen eye and we brush the cookie crumbs onto the floor because no one is watching. I plump my pillow so vigorously, it knocks everything off my nightstand, and he laughs and says that I’m a danger to myself and others. Those moments are all I want. I want a life of this. He sighs and I sigh.
The bad days are pretty much the birdseed moment, all day long. Sometimes it’s worse than the bickering over facts or the heavy gloom that descends on him, for which I do not blame him at all but it makes for a dark house. Brian gets an email from an old classmate, asking if he’ll arrange a fishing expedition for her and her husband. This was what he hoped to do when he retired—be a fishing guide, like he was in his twenties, when he took rich people out to hike and fish in Colorado. He mulls it over and I keep my mouth shut. At a couple of points, I actually lay my hand over my mouth. He can’t do it. He can still fish and he could show someone how to cast, but he can’t arrange an expedition and I don’t want to. I don’t want to help them have a once-in-a-lifetime day of fishing on the Housatonic River. I will be trading emails, making lunches, and trying to backstop Brian every inch of the way. Brian muses out loud for about ten minutes and says, with some sadness, I’ll have to decline. He puts on his hat and goes to fish and I am relieved, and I want to run after him and say, We can do it, if you really want to.
* * *
—
All fall, I veer between hand-wringing and grim determination. Rosh Hashanah comes and goes, likewise Yom Kippur, likewise a dinner party at which Brian unexpectedly excels at Celebrities and I feel a fool to have worried at all, likewise our family’s own Oktoberfest, in which my son and eldest granddaughter, our number one, Isadora （we were with her the day she was born, a bit too soon, in the middle of a fix-up-the-new-house visit, and we walked the halls and fielded calls and hugged and kissed everyone, including the nurses, did the atheists’ version of prayer, and now Brian calls her Darling, just to be on the safe side）， come down from Rochester, my daughter and my daughter-in-law and our shining light, little Zora, come up from Brooklyn, and we all go through a corn maze, with clues, and they get their faces or pumpkins painted and there is a donkey ride, after which we all eat an enormous lunch at Bishop’s Orchards. I have a memory of Zora waving from a small train that goes through a field and Izzy and the twins jumping from bale to bale in a hay tower. I cannot hold Brian in the picture. I know he went through the maze. I know he must have gone grinning down the big slide （there was never a big slide he didn’t go down）。 I know he must have ordered the grilled corn and the fancy fries, but I cannot see him in my mind’s eye. I cannot see much of that fall, and only pieces of Thanksgiving or Hanukkah or Christmas. I know we celebrated them all and I know he was there and I know, for that matter, that I was there, too, thinking, This will probably be the last, and fearing it would not be, that I would fail to help him, fail to help him get to Zurich, to the other side of the river, however we must go. I do remember Christmas because it is smaller than usual, just us and the kids and grandchildren and I beg off having my sister and her family, and I hardly care that I am disappointing them all. I remember it only because there are photos of Brian and me, him large and grand in his father’s jewel-toned silk robe, me, frowning, in my tatty robe. Sunlight is coming through the big window behind us and I look like an old woman on a long train ride, barely sitting up.
Memory Care
The leaves are yellow and red and I’m done reading about dementia （Alzheimer’s and the other ones: occipital, the one that makes you blind first, and another one, frontotemporal lobe, which moves faster and sometimes more dramatically with a personality shift, either to great, unshakable sweetness or to aggressive, sometimes-violent outbursts）。 I’m done reading about ways of ending your life and the laws about that. In the last few weeks, Brian and I have both observed, with something more than interest, that a memory-care unit is being built ten minutes from us. We drive past the construction site all the time and we remark on it, in the ways we do: Brian on the square footage, me, that it looks like a Red Roof Inn. Yesterday, we drove back from the grocery store and I slowed down as we passed it and Brian waved a hand. Drive on.
When Brian’s not around, I still sometimes sneak-watch videos of people with dementia and their loved ones: “Dementia Diaries” and Louis Theroux’s 2012 documentary, Extreme Love: Dementia. I step into and out of a BBC year-in-the-life series, with three people with dementia. There is one couple I come back to: in their late sixties, early seventies, so blue-eyed and best-foot-forward English they seem to have fallen from a Trollope （Anthony or Joanna） novel of people of a certain class and manner. Christopher’s a good-looking, white-haired, sweater-matches-the-eyes nautical type, working with ships for the last ten years, a magistrate before his retirement, and diagnosed seven years ago. There are photos all along the mantels and shelves; twenty years ago, he was gorgeous and carelessly impressive, and I know his now-wife must have fallen for him like a ton of bricks. I imagine that she left her husband, a balding real-estate lawyer. Possibly, her children were upset and never quite got over it, but everyone’s pleasant enough during the holidays and there were grandchildren and she was with the love of her life, so quite a happy ending, until Alzheimer’s. The wife, keen, loving, and British to the core, says, “And when you were a magistrate, you realized that things were, as you say, passing you by.” He chuckles and agrees. She chuckles encouragingly. She says, “And, of course, you never knew who you’d put away or didn’t.” He chuckles some more, as if to say, Quite right, old girl. I’ve watched this documentary three times, while emailing one more time to Wisconsin, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania for Brian’s various forms （birth certificate, divorce papers, our marriage certificate）。 Christopher says, punching his fist into his open hand, the gesture that punctuates all of his remarks about life, about pushing forward, about refusing to be stopped or cowed: “You have to keep on, but at some point, you have to decide what you’re going to do.”
I think he means that at some point in the infinity pool of dementia, you have to decide how long you want to stay. His wife either interprets his remark differently than I do or we share the same interpretation and she rejects it, because she says heartily, That’s right, you have to cope. He says, in agreement, but without conviction, Yes, cope.
I love him. A few minutes later, describing the difference between dementia and age-related absentmindedness, she says, grinning furiously, You just forget, don’t you （meaning Christopher）？ You just get into the car and you forget why you’re there, don’t you? He’s nodding and chuckling. She is in agony and comes close to laughing out loud, saying, to the camera, It is quite shattering at first.