Week 2

Everyone—and I mean everyone in the world right now—is sharing an experience in common. We are all members of the community of isolation.  We all use our phones and email to reach out to each other, to family, to friends, to people we haven’t talked to in years. We are so glad to hear each other’s voices, but frankly there is less and less to say. “What’s new?”  “Nothing much.” “The weather’s [fill-in-the-blank]”  “I’m watching [fill-in-the-blank]” “I cooked some [fill-in-the-blank]” The calls are getting shorter. They are more and more like my conversations with Ralph have been for months, years.

A truth that has dawned on me this second week in c-hibernation: Living as an Alzheimer’s caregiver has made adapting to living in the time of Corona easier than it may be for others. Those of us who are caregivers, like those of us living on the Alzheimer’s spectrum, have grown used to an approach to day-to-day life that prepared us for this time of grim uncertainty.

We know monotony and repetition, we know the feeling of limbo and the sense that things will probably get worse, we know the slow drip of dread. We also know how to deal with a reality we can do nothing about but can mitigate with small daily behavior.

We know how to problem-solve when the problem is amorphous and how to live in close quarters with another person we can only control so far. We know how to subdue our darker instincts—the annoyances and irritations that build into furies so easily. We have learned how not to lash out.

Now that Ralph and I are more or less settled into our new home (ignoring the dozens of boxes that aren’t getting unpacked because there’s nowhere to put the contents until we get shelving, which could be a long while), we are living a life not so different from our life before c-hibernation.

Every morning Ralph asks the same question,” Anything happening today?” and everyday, no matter what I answer, he follows exactly the same routine: breakfast, sit with the dogs while reading, a nap, lunch, a nap, sit with the dogs reading, supper, reading, sleep. Maybe there’s a little bit of exercise thrown in, and a shower, if I push.  But this is the same routine he’s followed for a long time. Meanwhile I follow my own routine of editing, writing, and managing what’s left of our real estate business Sure I can no longer take Ralph-breaks by escaping on errands or see friends, but I get about the same amount of exercise, I talk and text with friends incessantly, I watch the same bad escapist TV.

The big difference in our lives is that Ralph no longer smokes cigarettes. Oh, and his beer count has dropped from four a day to zero. The cessation of smoking was deliberate; once they saw lung damage, the doctors who previously said to let Ralph smoke, said no more. Ralph stopped cold turkey during his hospital stay and has not asked for a cigarette since. As for beer, I am not sure what happened, except he lost the habit. Habits are what guide Ralph’s day and once one is interrupted, it is out of his head. He is drinking a lot of milk instead. In solidarity I have stopped drinking Coke Zero, but my shift is only marginal, to diet-ginger ale. (I figure the ginger is good for me, right?)

So our new life—the city house that replaced the country farm as well as the new community restrictions on socializing or eating in the restaurants I was so looking forward to patronizing—is pretty much the same as our old life. Maybe quieter but also maybe healthier. I am strangely content, which of course makes me a little guilty. Except one thing I’ve learned in Memoryland is just when you start to feel at ease in your situation, the unexpected happens and usually not for the good.