“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood . . .” Frost’s The Road Not Taken was a grade school standard when I was a child, and I’m surprised that I can’t recite it by memory. (As ever, when I notice my memory fail, I reach for paper & pen in order to draw a circle, make it into a clock adding numbers and setting the hands to ten past eleven, two to two. Still ok. So not a sign of memory loss then, just a sign of aging.)
For years when Doug and I walked together, I led, if only because I had the longer legs and the faster pace. Turning to make sure he was behind me became second nature, until it became clear that I couldn’t be sure he would follow me, and we started to walk everywhere hand in hand.
Long after Doug moved in to long-term care and I walked by myself, I’d stop and look over my shoulder. Even though I knew he wouldn’t be there. I thought this would be a habit for life. That I would never stop pausing, looking over my shoulder, making sure he was there.
But Dementia created a fork in the road, and neither of us can truly follow the other. I thought about this a lot over Labour Day weekend, which was glorious - warm and sunny. I sat on my deck with a coffee first thing in the morning, before joining my family for a local walk we all love. Doug loved it too, and we often walked it together when he was still able to.
After that walk I visited him in his home, where he was on isolation due to a respiratory illness (he has since recovered!) so I wasn’t able to take him outside in his wheelchair to feel the sun on his face. I was in full PPE, unrecognisable even to myself. I looked at him in his bed, knowing he was unaware of the gorgeous weather, and I tried to pretend for a few moments the fresh Ontario peaches and local raspberries I’d brought him were a treat that in some small way made up for his quarantine, and the fact that he hadn’t joined me for coffee on our deck, or for a walk with the family.
In the beginning he lost his words. Now I’ve lost mine. I read other people’s words to him whilst holding his hand. If I can make it through a visit without crying, I consider that a win.
I am currently reading him non-fiction (half-memoir, half-history), a book about the American Civil War which we both enjoyed reading together in the past. It was only published in 1988, but I am surprised by the language. There are words I won’t read aloud, so I change them or skip those sentences . . . which is making me think about censorship, change, freedom of speech, banned books, my past offences . . . all subjects I’d love to discuss with Doug. (One podcast I listen to calls them “deep dive conversations.”)
What I want to tell him is this:
After over six years’ deep friendship with a woman I first met via the Breakfast Club (a woman Doug knew well), I recently met her son. It is, in retrospect, extraordinary that our paths hadn’t crossed before, as I’ve met her daughter, son-in-law, sisters, nieces, grandchildren, great niece and great nephew, brother-in-law . . . Doug and her husband were very close friends. Her son has a busy life (job, pets, friends) and for the past many years he was his wife’s primary caregiver. And then there was Covid. Last year he was widowed; this year we met when his Mom suggested we might be compatible travel companions.
We are indeed compatible.
A door has opened unexpectedly. I have walked through it, and embraced this new relationship. If our roles were reversed, and Doug had lost me to dementia, so that I was no longer able to go to the movies with him, have dinner with him, travel with him, I hope he would do the same, and allow his heart to expand. I am choosing to continue living my life; my new companion is not replacing Doug, and he understands - with first hand experience - what it is to lose someone to an illness, what it is to say goodbye again and again, what it is to grieve the loss of someone who is still alive. He knows that Doug is my husband, and still very much a part of my life, and we are navigating the circustances of our relationship with care and love for all.
“Decisions and events. Some we control. Others we don’t. But we do what we have to do to survive and create lives around what we have.” (Karen Dunn Skinner)
