It’s not just about his wedding ring
February 23, 2018 § 7 Comments
I thought that the next blog post would be about my heart break when the Director of Memory Care handed me his wedding ring. It was recovered from under his bed in the morning. She thought it would be lost, best if I took it home. I felt that she was giving me back a part of myself that I had lovingly given away and wasn’t supposed to ever have back.
Then I found an extra set of house keys, tarnished and worn. I held them in my hands and knew they were his keys. Probably left on the dining table, their usual spot, the day he moved to the facility.
Simple things, symbols of how much my loved one has lost. Connections to a marriage and the freedom to come and go from home. Dementia erases everything that was part of your life as you once lived it and leaves you only with the present moment. I try to prepare myself for the time when he does not know who I am. Tears. My vulnerability makes me toughen up.
Now he struggles to make words. I hate telling him that I don’t understand, to try again. His speechlessness is devastating to me for I long to have a conversation with the man I married twelve years ago. My sweet husband moves on to the next indecipherable phrase.
Tonight after his dinner, I tried to turn on a TV show to watch together snuggling in an oversized chair in the privacy of his room but he’s distracted. He leans over and kisses my forehead as always. I ask him if my hair gets in his mouth. He says “sometimes,” the word comes out clear as a bell and he kisses my bangs again. “I love you,” he says, words he still shares ten thousand times. I look into his big blue eyes and tell him “forever.”