In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss(12)

Spring 2019, Stony Creek

Tell Me Why





Our normal life had begun to require a level of effort that I’d last had to make when I had an unhappy marriage, a full-time job, a teenager, a toddler, and a baby, with none of the joy. Having barely looked at another man or woman for fourteen years, I was now imagining myself having drinks on a rooftop lounge with pleasant but unlikely, even unpromising, companions. Brian and I were always stickily close; we liked to grocery shop together. We liked to go to the fish market and the bakery and the dry cleaner’s together. He was as familiar with my shoes and shopping preferences as my sister was. I had even driven with him across New England to visit fancy fly-fishing stores. Now I exhaled when he went for a long walk and ruminated late at night that maybe I could get him a small apartment in New Haven (a studio seemed punitively small, so I thought a decent one-bedroom, in a walkable neighborhood), with some kind of helper, if needed.

How I could have contemplated “helper” and managed not to wonder why I was thinking that my sixty-five-year-old husband, who read Faulkner and worked out three times a week, would need a…helper, I couldn’t—absolutely could not—say.

We would still do parental and grandparental things together, and I imagined that somehow the family would never have to know that I found it impossible to live with this man who I clearly adored. I didn’t tell anyone in the world that I had these thoughts. I did tell close friends that he was driving me crazy with his male mid-sixties/early retirement/loose ends. And it will pass, I said to myself, and look—he’s making stained glass (I found the teacher, made the appointment for the lesson, and located the studio) and going to his book club (I scanned the planning emails when he felt overwhelmed and I ran to the library for the book) and he’s pursuing the occasional zoning fights of our little town and studying the town’s bylaws with great enthusiasm, so, really, what’s wrong? I couldn’t say, but I knew that this man was not the man I’d married, and the change had happened not over fifty years, which would have been very sad but not puzzling, but over three years. And since I still couldn’t say anything about it to anyone, I certainly couldn’t do anything about it.

I did the reading and I watched the videos and I pushed myself to see what I wasn’t willing or able to see a year ago—Brian had had the signs of mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s since late 2016.

For the oldest son of a large Italian family, having a woman wait on him, or serve him, or assist him when assistance was desired (when it was not desired, there was no helping him at all) was pleasant and comforting; and, at least half the time, it was pleasant and comforting to me. I’d become a stepmother to a ten-year-old when I was twenty-one, and I liked that job more than I think most girls would have. I graduated from college, got and then quit the job of a lifetime at a theater in New York. (“My boyfriend thinks it’s too hard to have a family and be in the theater,” I said. Everyone was at least ten years older than I, and I think they felt the annoyed pity one does for lucky young people who don’t know what they’re throwing away. No one laughed or scolded me or took my car keys away. I moved back to Connecticut, moved in with my former professor and his son, and we became a family.) I took a job at a daycare center. I was home by three, so I could make cookies and play gin with my almost-stepson. I took him to doctors’ appointments (where the nurse stared at us both in our nearly identical graphic T-shirts, shaggy hair, and drooping bell-bottoms and then shrugged), and I took a strong stand against his parents clothing him in earth-tone plaids, which made him look like a cholera victim. I shopped with him, played Othello and backgammon, tucked him in (when he wanted to be tucked in), cooked what he wanted to eat, insisted he write thank-you notes, and defended him against all comers. I was as good a parent as I knew how to be, because there was something about the job that mattered to me (well, not “something”: my own mother, who was a loving presence and a terrible cook but never protected me from anything or anyone, handicapped as she was by besetting anxiety). I have liked caring and doing and protecting since my first round as a mother and got better at it with two more children, and by the time I got to Brian’s early Alzheimer’s—even though neither of us knew what it was—the steady ratcheting up of tactful assistance, comforting, protecting, and general back-leading was imperceptible to me.

But my dapper husband (I used to describe his professional wardrobe, admiringly, as gay Mafia hit man) refused to wear anything but a T-shirt and baggy jeans, and he took early retirement from a job that I knew he could do in his sleep.





Early Retirement





Brian got his last job four years ago, as a university architect, by being Brian, as far as I can tell. He described a series of interviews, all kinds of questions about architecture, interior design, and collaborative work. He said he told the committee he was a team player (very true) and adaptable (not very true). He came home feeling that he’d nailed it, heard from someone on the interview committee that he had, and was hired twenty-four hours after the interview. Neither of us could tell, after a few months, exactly what the problems were. I wondered why he seemed to have such poor communication with the office manager and the administrative assistants and why he got such a cool response, after a month, from his boss, the woman who’d hired him with such enthusiasm.