Closed Doors (Things I Cannot Know)

There are questions I wish I’d asked my grandparents while they were still alive. There are questions I wish I’d asked Dad. I have recently been on holiday with my mother; I tried to ask her all the questions . . . but I know in twenty years I’ll realise there were some (many) I’ve forgotten.

So much I didn’t ask, don’t know, and will now will never know. (I am not the only person to feel this way. How many times does Munro explore this very subject in her fiction?!) 

Doug and I had many conversations when we understood his memory was fading, but there are many serious things we didn’t discuss. I know if he predeceases me he’d like me to have his body cremated in the most environmentally friendly way possible, and then he’d like me to sprinkle his ashes along some of our favourite canoe routes and walking paths. This I can, and shall do. 

I know he hoped that I would never place him into a long term care home. I did not honour this wish. It was one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever had to make, and I still struggle with regrets, despite knowing that I was no longer able to provide the best possible care for him, despite the horrors of Covid, despite the reality of his health today. Two of his sisters cut all ties with me because of that decision, and Doug lost the window of time they might have spent with him.

As impossible as it seems now, we did not fully grasp how dementia might affect him . . . until it was too late. In some ways, certainly, it was a blessing that we were so ignorant of the future. And yet, knowing that one day we might not be able to have any sort of meaningful conversation would have been helpful back when we could still talk to each other. Back when I could still ask “what would you prefer if . . . ?” and “what if . . .?” and “but what if . . .?” 

I am deeply grateful that I do not have the right as his wife (and power of attorney) to even contemplate MAiD. It is not a decision I could make on his behalf. I will struggle if ever I have to make a choice around euthanasia with regards our cat, Piper. Although I will never want her to suffer, I’ll no more be able to ask her if she’s in pain or not, content or not, than I am able to ask Doug.

One of the many things we did not talk about was what to do if we lost each other in a way other than death. We vowed to “travel together as husband and wife through stormy days and still, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, all the days of our lives until death do us part.” It is not death which has separated us, but dementia. Even when I am sitting right beside him, I am lost to Doug, and he is lost to me. 

I will always love Doug. I desperately miss the man I fell in love with, married, and made such a happy life with. He is no longer that man, but he is still my husband, and I love the person he has become, albeit in a very different way than I loved the man he was when he was well.

But now, more than ever, I wish we’d talked about a future we couldn’t imagine. 

I am hanging on to his insistence that I “follow my bliss” when we first met and I told him I was thinking of returning to school. It was advice he often repeated, to me, to himself, to others. “I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be. (Jospeh Campbell)”

(I took all these photographs in Tuscany, Italy in June, while I was on vacation with my Mum. It was a holiday Doug would have loved.)