Category Archives: Caregiver/Spouse Issues

The Business of Remembering…A Sense of Time and Identity

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“The business of remembering what you did that day, or what you might want to do the next, I think, is essential for creating an overview of your life – that overview is what fuels plan-making and that ties in deeply with identity.”

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In case you missed it, this comment was made about my last post by  Jabberwalk, who writes with great insight and honesty at her own site Caregiving in the Forest.I can’t stop mulling over the implications.

Time is the trickiest part of life for Ralph. Almost the first thing he asks each morning is what day of the week it is. Sometimes he remembers what he did or parts of what he did yesterday, sometimes he doesn’t. Often he misremembers. He doesn’t like the confusion his lousy short-term memory breeds, but he lives with it by asking for a rehash over and over hoping for clarity that seldom comes.

We all fear the loss of short-term memory, but the problem of future memory is in some ways more troubling. When Ralph looks forward to what comes next, what he seems to see is an anxiety-producing obstacle course. Since he can’t hold on to the facts of place and time, he becomes increasingly anxious each time he asks again Where? but mostly When? The issue for me becomes how much information does he need, how much is a burden.

Not only do I make the scheduling decisions, but I also end up structuring what he thinks about that schedule, and therefore what he thinks about period. In other words, I am taking away or at least shrinking his overview.

His sense of identity has certainly shrunk. Yes, he is an increasingly passionate dog lover because dogs demand so little and remember on their own. And he remains a husband, not an equal partner perhaps but genuinely grateful to his wife for filling in the blanks. He is still a father too, although his memory of the kids’ childhoods is sketchy and he keeps up less and less with their adult lives because he finds tracking the details so difficult. He was glad to let go of his professional identity and hand me that responsibility early on. While he can be charming in social encounters, his interest in friendship and being a friend is limited by his difficulty remembering who people are, their names of course but more importantly, their connection to him. While still capable of moments of remarkable perception, he is no longer interested in being an intellectual or armchair philosopher because it requires remembering a train of thought.

I remember lots of trains of thought. I carry around layers of overview based on the different roles I play—wife, writer, friend, woman, businessperson, spiritual seeker, reader, political thinker, mother (Note that caregiver is not on this quickly written list—a Freudian slip I just noticed myself).

These roles operate within and are influenced by the various ways I frame my time. There is the constant background hum of long-term, generalized plans still under construction (i.e. How much longer until we need to downsize? What are my options if/when needs professional care?). More immediately, there is the weekly erasable-board calendar that Ralph and I live by day-to-day; there is the monthly wall calendar as well as the one on my phone. And there is the semi-conscious minute-by-minute and hourly tracking most of us fold into our routine (unless we are on the Alzheimer’s continuum and struggle to remember whether we ate lunch already) without much conscious thought.

But what has always been almost second nature, like making coffee as soon as I get up in the morning, is getting more difficult. Lately I have trouble both keeping my plans organized and keeping a hold on my sense of self within those plans, largely because of the important role-identity I just caught myself forgetting to include above. Caregiver, leads to another identity: AliceasRalph.

Keeping Ralph’s life organized and reminding him what he is doing on a given day means I also remind him why and how he feels, which means I make an effort to get into his head to understand his mindset. Thus is born AliceasRalph, who often ends up as confused as he is by his confusion about whatever I am trying to explain. Our weirdly opaque discussions can sound like the old WHO’S ON FIRST comedy routine.

Ralph’s overview of his life, if not lost entirely, is definitely tangled. And because I am both Alice and AliceasRalph, my overview is pretty tangled too. Not hopelessly, but moving forward requires vigilance as I ceaselessly work to untangle the delicate filaments without breaking them.

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What Is Normal Anyway?

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people_in_the_park_204264 Is this the couple  Ralph and I are becoming? Jaunty hats and sensible shoes? Would it be so bad if we were them? Don’t they  look  happy and normal? But what is normal?

As I look at the life Ralph and I share now, I can’t help wondering.

When he was first diagnosed with relatively advanced Mild Cognitive Impairment, Ralph was in his mid-sixties and considered young to be jumping on the Alzheimer’s escalator. Now he is approaching 70 and those  symptoms—fogginess, lack of energy, loss of short-term memory, disengagement—that seemed so out of keeping with our peers a few years ago fall more comfortably into the gray area called “the aging process.”

And after all aging  is normal and even desirable  (the alternative being death) although it hits us each differently. For example, I called Ralph’s oldest friend the other day; the two have drifted out of touch over the years but Ralph still talks affectionately about Jim and I thought reconnecting  and reminiscing would be nice for them both to do while Ralph still can. Jim was excited at the prospect of re-connecting with Ralph but we couldn’t actually talk until  he put in his special hearing aid for phone use.

In that moment it occurred to me as it has before that while Ralph remains on his plateau of not-quite-Alzheimer’s-yet, his issues are not radically different from other men his age, at least according to what I hear from the women my age who live with them. So many of my friends complain that their husbands are slowing down faster than they are, that they no longer want to travel, that they’re becoming stay-at-homes, that they are more passive than they used to be, that they need to be cared for, that they require a lot of patience.

And we women have our own issues, or at least I do. The sleep issue—never more than six hours and often less, with the resulting sense of dull tiredness and desire for an afternoon nap. A nap for God’s sake! Ugh. The driving issue—is my driving getting worse or am I just more nervous? The concentration issue—much harder to turn off the wifi and buckle down (although maybe this problem will go away after election day). And of course the fashion issue—not that I ever dressed fashionably or learned to use make up but nowI either look as if I’m trying too hard or not hard enough.

The thing is, I still do feel younger, still want to fight aging, while Ralph has embraced it. Our day-to-day life has fallen into a frankly pretty comfortable pattern set largely by Ralph’s needs and wants. The pattern scares me because I find it enticingly easy to fill so much time dealing with minutia concerning managing Ralph’s care, our finances and our household, especially since my social life has actually expanded as Ralph’s has contracted. If this is this my new normal, it is not all bad? But I worry, where is my zest for the intellectual and creative ambitions that have always defined me before?

In a weird way I am almost heartened personally by the current election season in which two of my peers slug it out with vigorous, and in one case even brutal, energy (although I’m not saying their “normal” is the one I want). I want to believe I can still find that kind of passion and energy in myself. But maybe not, and maybe that’s okay.

Sorting out what is normal under my circumstances, or what is normal under any individual’s individual circumstances, is not easy, but it is where I find myself.

(PS. Last nightI asked Ralph, as I always do, if he’d talked to anyone during the day. He said no. I checked his phone. There was Jim’s number at the top of received calls; evidently they’d talked for over half an hour.)

BRAGGING, NOT RAGGING, ON RALPH

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Lately, I’ve been complaining a lot here about the difficulties of living with Ralph as his cognitive skills wobble and wane. While I hope that my honesty in voicing frustrations as I explore ways to manage as caregiver-spouse has been useful to others, I know I sometimes lose perspective (thank you to friends here you rein me in).

So it’s good to be reminded that life is not a straight line, especially when Ralph is doing the reminding:

1.The day after the contractor incident earlier this week (see ), Ralph asked me whether he’d had an argument with a contractor and what was it about. I told him, trying to soft peddle as best I could.

“Oh well, we can replace the system if he thinks it’s necessary,” he shrugged.

Despite my expectations, he hasn’t brought the subject up again, except to        acknowledge that he is embarrassed by his own behavior. Pre-diagnosis Ralph was almost Trump-like in his inability to apologize for mistakes so I consider his contrition a sign of emotional growth.

2.Then yesterday, while listening to the news, he made a comment so astute I must share it with you all. Someone on the radio complained about political correctness and Ralph stopped sipping his coffee to say, “Why would anyone want to be incorrect about politics or anything else?”

Why indeed? I borrowed his observation and posted it on my facebook pages where “likes” flowed in. Although he may not remember the details, Ralph can still cut through to the chase.

3.The kicker is a conversation we had an hour ago. Periodically I must drive to St. Petersburg, Florida, to manage the affairs of a disabled cousin. Since it’s a seven-hour drive each way, I have to spend the night. I long ago gave up on getting Ralph to come with me. Last year I drove down with a friend who also has (difficult) family to visit in the area. Another friend may drive down with me next week; she needs a break and I’ve bribed her with the promise of a gourmet meal, a nice hotel and the Dali Museum. But she has warned me she might have to cancel at the last minute.

Ralph must have heard me talking on the phone about the trip as he was napping on the couch because out of nowhere, he sat up and OFFERED TO COME WITH ME. Note the capital letters in red ink. I was/am flummoxed.

Whether he comes or not is not the point—and frankly, I’d hate to have him miss his art class, which is so important in his mental life (one week wouldn’t matter but he has to miss class the next week too, ah the complexities of Ralph’s usually empty schedule!).

The point is that he is still capable of breaking through the Alzheimer’s shell of inward-gazing to think about someone else’s well being, and that someone else is me, not as his caregiver but as his wife whom he wants to take care of.

So at the moment I am feeling an emotion that our relationship doesn’t often raise in me  lately—I ‘m not talking about affection, although I am feeling that too, but gratitude that this particular man is in my life.

“I LOVE YOU”–Easier Said Than Done For Caregivers of the Cognitively Impaired

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I happened to read a post at the Alzheimer’s Reading Room call Three Little Words. I am sure the article’s author Bob DeMarco is right. I realize that saying “I love you” is a wonderful thing to say. I am sure DeMarco is also right that changing patterns of behavior as a caregiver is a good idea.

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But frankly I am not feeling it at the moment. I can hear you responding, that’s the point. If you say it, you will change how you are feeling and behaving. I get it intellectually and I don’t not love Ralph. But saying those words, and I do, sounds hollow. The truth, which is not always pretty, is that being together with him day in and day out is an emotional drain. Solitary even when we are in the same room and de-energizing because I tend to let myself drift into a slough of inaction with Ralph that I find both debilitating and anxiety-producing. (And yes, I know I should do things to make him more active, and I try, I really do.)

So, politically incorrect as this may be, I admit that I often put my own needs before Ralph’s these days. As I have said here before, we never had exactly an easy, or even happy marriage. I blame myself as much as him because I passively allowed him to be what he called “the captain” of the family, what the rest of us sometimes called the bully. My reasons were the usual complex mix of love, laziness, fear, and indecision.

Now, of course, Ralph is someone else altogether. As am I.

He has become the passive, gentle man who sat in the car today without complaining while I did grocery shopping on our way home from his aborted shrink appointment—for which he blamed not his therapist or me but himself for screwing up the dates and which despite the two hours spent driving in the car was not a complete waste of time because it gave his day a focus. The new jovial Ralph didn’t care that my run into Publix for milk turned into a full-fledged six-bag expedition.

Ten years ago, even if all I needed was a quick pint of milk, I would have driven him home and then driven back to the store we were passing on the way rather than argue over the practicality of adding an extra hour of driving to my life. For better or worse that weak-kneed version of Alice has disappeared. I have become a woman who tries to be diligent in her care but is seldom anything approaching affectionate.

Which brings me to this further shocking-to-me admission: Lately I have found myself transferring my affections from Ralph to another love object.

lola                I snuggle with Lola. I baby-talk to her the way I always made fun of other dog owners for doing. I encourage her to lie on the bed with me while I drink my morning coffee (especially since Ralph prefers to sit outside with his first cigarette). For the last month we have been taking classes together to make her more obedient. She now comes as soon as I call and stays sitting in “place” until I tell her otherwise. Along with obedience, she has become much more attached to me. All I do is look her way and she is by my side licking my ankle.

Ralph’s attachment comes with complications. Lola’s is much simpler (except that she eats my shoes). For me having Lola to love on has been a real help. And Ralph is not the least bit jealous.

Has Ralph’s Cognitive Impairment Turned Me Into A Butterfly, Or A Moth?

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IMG_0250[Fittingly this moth (or faded butterfly) has fossilized onto our garage wall]

The fishing trip Ralph was scheduled to go on last week didn’t happen. His fishing buddy’s wife got sick and needed him at home. Ralph did not mind AT ALL…”I am dreading it”he kept saying as he usually does before going anywhere… and I was secretly relieved that the four days I had resigned myself to giving up were suddenly restored. I briefly considered not telling anyone, using the found time as a holiday from the world.

But I didn’t.

Instead, I called my vegetable garden partner to do some playing among the squash and corn on Monday.IMG_0298                                                                   I spent all Tuesday morning at a business meeting I’d forgotten to cancel, then called my Tuesday walking buddy. Wednesday I went to my Pilates class and then drove a visiting photographer, sponsored by the ArtRez committee I’m increasingly involved with, into Atlanta to spend the day at the Martin Luther King Center. I made a lunch date on Thursday with a friend I knew needed cheering up. And on Friday I headed back to Atlanta for a meeting of the patient and family advisory committee at Emory’s Brain Center.

Then I picked up my daughter at the airport. She and her husband came to stay at the farm for the weekend and we all attended a wedding together.

In the years before Ralph’s diagnosis, this week would have seemed a whirlwind of social activity.

But as Ralph’s social world contracts, mine seems to expand, as my recent posts attest. This is in many ways a good thing. I love having new friends, love being engaged with the world around me. But I also recognize a certain manic need that I need to face more squarely….

I was the kind of child whose grandmother caught me hiding in the coat closet at family gatherings. As I’ve written here before, I was the introvert, Ralph the extrovert. He loved to go to parties and stay late. I wanted to stay home or leave early.

So why have I turned into this gadabout who joins committees, seeks out new friendships at every turn, commits to projects without thinking?

FEAR is the word that pops into my head.

Our life together, Ralph’s and mine, could so easily become a constant retreat from the world. And to be honest, I feel drawn to drift along on Ralph’s rhythms. To rise late and go to bed early. To spend my day not doing much or talking much.

What I fear is the attraction I feel to downshifting with Ralph.

A lot of dealing with a spouse with cognitive impairment revolves how much to accept, how much to fight and push back. I cannot see into Ralph’s brain or read his thoughts. I understand he is viewing the world differently these days and that his needs have changed. But we don’t really talk about it. I sense he doesn’t want to, and I am not eager to press. All I can do is to [try to] accept who he is at the moment and not make unfair demands.

Because Ralph has a reason, an excuse, to withdraw from more active engagement with the world. (And dementia activists aside, he has made that choice.)

The problem is that sometimes that withdrawal is scarily appealing to me. Is that appeal innate within the mentally and physically lazy woman I’ve always been? Or is it a sign that I am becoming that dreaded condition called “old.” Neither option sounds too good.

I’m not about to cut back on my friends and commitments in order to burrow into a domestic burrow with Ralph. But I am going to work for a little more balance.

Mea Culpa–Sometimes This Caregiving Spouse Gets Angry (And That’s OK)

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Ok, so the truth is that I have been walking around all week furious at Ralph. Is that allowed, to be angry with someone with cognitive impairment? I have a voice in my head that I’ll call White Rabbit but that I also imagine (perhaps unfairly, but if I’m going for honesty here…) represents Alzheimer’s activists who would tell me, “No you don’t have that right. You can’t expect him to be a practical helpmate. You have to support him, not the other way around. You are a selfish bitch.” (I don’t really imagine the activist saying that last bit, but White Rabbit definitely.)

Well, my answer, this morning anyway, is so what? And I think it is important to accept my real feelings. As I try to define my role in Ralph’s life going forward, it doesn’t help to sweep the uncomfortable, unpretty emotional bits under the carpet. And the fact is that some of the ways he infuriates me now are no different from the ways he infuriated me before he was diagnosed.

So why am I angry this week? The details as I try to put them in typing sound almost silly: We have a rental townhouse in Florida that was recently flooded out after the neighboring townhouse’s pipes burst. I have had to take all the responsibility for dealing with insurance and repairs. I have been doing a lot of driving 5½ hours each way for 24 hour visits. This weekend is the final push—taking all the supplies and furnishing unavailable there and setting up the place. Usually I go alone but I need Ralph’s physical help this time. And he is driving me crazy.

I understand that when he repeats questions or statements, he really cannot help it. I may get impatient but I do understand. I understand why he keeps asking why we’re taking all these things to Florida, why he can’t remember to do the basic tasks he’s been assigned, why he keeps saying we can fit everything in the back seat when we obviously can’t since it’s already full. The annoyance of our repetitive dialogue gets on my nerves but is not why I am angry (well, a teensy bit).

I am angry because his obliviousness, which I usually convince myself to accept as a symptom of Alzheimer’s, is nothing new. During most of our marriage I could not depend on him when I was overwhelmed with responsibility.

And that’s what rankles.

Because I may be Ralph’s caretaker, but I’m also his wife. I imagine the wife role will recede more than it has already—and it keeps receding as our communication becomes more limited and we share less and less except the mildest chitchat—but for now the wife in me still has stored resentments that burble up when I’m triggered into remembering all the other times I couldn’t count on him, when he was self-important and impatient with my requests for help, when he was belittling, when he was generally a jerk—and all the times he was a delight too of course, but that’s another conversation.-

ON LABELS, ROLES AND MARRIAGE WITH ALZHEIMER’S

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There has been quite a bit of discussion lately on the blogosphere about how to label or not label people with dementia, specifically whether the word “sufferer” is verboten. I am not yet brave enough to discuss the issue in detail [although basically I’m all for not labeling, but I’m also for being free to label myself any way I want without feeling as if I’ve broken some rule], but it’s got me thinking a lot about labels in general. Not so much Ralph’s as my own.

And maybe LABEL is the wrong word. Maybe I mean ROLE.

Over the last couple of years, I have grown to think of myself more and more as Ralph’s “caregiver” and have heard myself talk (pontificate?) about what being a “Caretaker” entails. It’s such an easy catchall phrase. But now I am beginning to rethink just how I should describe myself.

During the last ten years of my mother’s life I was the primary “family caretaker” although there were always professional caretakers on hand to do the often literally dirty work. She was in my house and I was the one making decisions about her care. I was the one writing checks to those care professionals out of our joint account. I was the one informing my siblings when I sensed a problem. (I was also the one complaining about my siblings and being complained about—butt-calls and miss-directed emails kept us all more informed than we’d like on both counts.) I was the one sitting in the emergency room at least once a month toward the end.

She became less and less my mother than my responsibility, my duty.  Ironically, that was when my patience increased. The unresolved conflicts between us became irrelevant, dissolving like the thread doctors use to stitch up torn skin. At some point I stopped feeling like a daughter.

But as fraught as the mother-daughter relationship can be, the husband-wife relationship  is fraught in a whole different way–especially in a marriage with a man whose mental world is shrinking while mine is not.

Am I more wife or caregiver? As much as my marriage and relationship with Ralph have changed, despite my new sense of being the decider, I am not sure which way to answer that question.

Because he still annoys me the way only a husband can. The other day he was repeating one of his boastful but charming stories for the third or fourth time in half an hour. That immediate repetition I didn’t mind—it’s the Alzheimer’s speaking—but I have probably heard that story over a hundred times in our life together, since long before any memory loss, and frankly I’m sick of it.

And because I still use that bitchy tone I have always reserved especially for him on occasions of mild to extreme annoyance. Although the issues are smaller these days than in the past, I’ve noticed that my annoyance can be just as extreme. What’s changed is that Ralph doesn’t shout at me or storm out the way he used to. Instead with earnest sincerity, he asks me not to use that tone because it makes him feel bad. And then I have a complicated wifely reaction of guilt and resentment, based on our history and all the times we made each other feel bad.

On the other hand, I still feel the need to get his opinion and advice, on business decisions, on family matters, on what blouse to wear. Of course Ralph used to be extremely opinionated, always ready to give advice whether I was ready to receive it or not. Now he is easily swayed by what I think and really has no opinion on most matters, political, social, or sartorial.

So, yes, Ralph’s reactions to daily life and to me have changed since his diagnosis of Mild Cognitive Impairment/Early Alzheimer’s. But I am not thinking about  Ralph right now, but about me, however selfish that sounds. I am worrying how I may be changing.

I have that luxury because Ralph’s mental state is on a plateau; his memory and other symptoms have held steady for the last year. Therefore our marriage is also on a plateau, part purgatory and part second honeymoon, as we watch for signs of the deterioration everyone agrees will be coming sooner or later.

Meanwhile my emotions regarding Ralph, while tempered by my awareness of his diagnosis and prognosis, are pretty much the same as they have been since practically the day we met: a crazy quilt of guilt, contentment, resentment, protectiveness, impatience, loyalty, recalcitrance, affection, annoyance, love and occasional hate.

And my self-definition—creative independent woman, passive helpmate, head of household, housewife, caregiver, care giving wife, wife who cares for, wife who wants to escape to Tahiti—remains constantly in flux. I am the woman I’ve always been, but I’m someone else as well. That caregiver word is there, stuck in the middle, not yet in capital letters.

IMG_0130(This crazy quilt belonged to my grandmother. Note the centennial snippet.)

Energy–His, Mine, Ours

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It’s a little after noon on Sunday afternoon. Ralph is in the bedroom “resting.” He woke up at eight and we drank coffee until nine so his morning was not exactly demanding. But we are scheduled to meet friends at the movies at 2.

Resting at length in preparation for any out-of-the-ordinary activity has become the norm. He rests all morning the day he takes his art class. He rests most of the day before we go out for dinner. He does not attach his need to conserve his energy to his cognitive issues—well, he doesn’t attach any of his behavior to his cognitive issues, but I think the resting has  to do with controlling his anxiety more than a physical need.

And if it works, great. I certainly don’t fault him for needing to rest for whatever reason. But I am also aware that his need for rest affects my own in ways I don’t like exploring too carefully. Am I as energetic as I could be or am I using his lack of energy as an excuse to be less vigorous in my pursuits as well? When he goes to sleep at eight, I often stay up alone for hours wasting my time on bad television or online robot bridge, telling myself my brain is too taxed to read—it’s not. If I don’t work on revising my novel when he is resting, I tell myself I can’t concentrate because he is in the next room. It is so easy to follow his time line and energy line, to drop down a notch or two on the activity scale. It is a dangerous slope.

Partners in a long marriage either grow together or apart. Given our particular marriage’s ups and downs, it’s a pleasant surprise that Ralph’s Early Alzheimer’s has brought us together in many ways. But I need to be careful. His cognitive failings dominate much of our marriage; I need to be sure not to use him now to let things that matter slide, to avoid the sometimes difficult choice to live my life to its fullest.

CHANCE ENCOUNTER/MUTUAL SUPPORT

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So there I was in a store at the shopping center looking for a cheap picture frame when I ran into a woman I have half-known for years. Our daughters were in school together at some point in the distant past but never actually played together. Susan and I run into each other occasionally at the grocery store. We’re always cordial when we meet and joke because we seem to have the same shopping schedule, but we barely know each other. She grew up in this small town; I’m a relative newcomer. She tall, blonde and well-mannered. I’m short, frizzy haired and socially awkward.

So after we said our usual brief hellos and asked about each other’s child, I moved down the aisle. A moment later someone called my name. I turned around and it was Susan smiling but looking slightly nervous.

She explained that she had seen my name on a group email address from a local Alzheimer’s support group I attend sporadically. For a moment I was a little shocked and almost defensive—I admit I have not quite figured out how to be totally comfortable acknowledging Ralph’s condition except to close friends—but then came the flash of recognition: She saw my name on that list because she was on it too.

We stood in that aisle for I don’t know how long, sharing our stories, commiserating, advising, laughing, and occasionally holding back tears. For two women who barely knew each other, we felt a new but very real bond and a genuine affection, not unlike what many of us care-giving bloggers feel for each other.

But this was in person. And not at a meeting of a support group, which is in some ways a time out from day-to-day life in order to focus narrowly on my caregiver identity. I certainly appreciate the lovely people I have met there, but connecting to Susan was different, a reminder of how widespread Alzheimer’s is of course, but also something larger I am not sure I can articulate. About openness, and not only openness concerning Alzheimer’s. About hoe people are always deeper and more interesting than we assume. In making facile assumptions (in my case writing off Susan as belonging to a world where I didn’t fit), opportunities for real friendship may be missed.

Susan and I parted that day promising to get together again for lunch one day. I hope we do…

 

Appreciating the Common Cold

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This will be short because I don’t have much time to write today. Ralph is sick in bed with a very bad cold and I am playing nurse—note, I said playing and nurse, not being or caregiver.

In the old days when Ralph was sick, I always complained, at least to myself, about what a baby he was. Now I find myself offering to make him toast and tea. I make pots of homemade chicken soup. I have skipped scheduled meetings and almost cancelled a trip Ralph and I both agree I should take with my son.

Yet I feel none of the resentment I usually feel around my never-ending sense of responsibility toward Ralph.

Why? I keep asking myself until I realize that it is much easier to deal with the fact of Ralph with a concrete, physical, medical ailment. Not that the brain changes connected to Alzheimer’s are not medical or the plaque build up in his brain is not physical. But for me there is a psychological or maybe I should say magical thinking difference:

What Ralph calls his fogginess is frustrating to manage or even face because it is hard to quantify. Maybe his namenda and donepezil make a difference, maybe they don’t. Maybe I sense him losing more memory lately and being slower on the uptake or maybe I’m looking at his every sentence too closely and reading too much into his slips. I don’t know and don’t always trust my guesses.

On the other hand, a stuffed nose is a stuffed nose and a fever of 102, while serious, can be measured going up or down. The efficacy of cold medicine is uncertain but plop plop fizz fizz what a relief a cold can be. After all, we both know he will recover from it—tomorrow or the next day his nose will stop running, his fever will drop, and physically at least he’ll be “better”. His memory? Not so much.