And Then There's This... Norma: Flashes and Fixations

This is the March 21, 2020, excerpt from “Stardust: An Alzheimer's Love Story,” my day to day accounts of caring for my wife Norma in the advanced stages of her dementia.

This time I'm scared.

Instead of being awakened in the middle of the night by Norma's tentative “Hello?,” this time it's a loud and frantic “Ed! Ed!”

I kick off the covers of my bed and without even picking up my phone and glasses rush into her bedroom. She's sitting on the edge of the bed, and I wonder if she might have just fallen out as she has a couple of times before.

“What's wrong? Is it the thunder?” I ask, taking note of the storm for the first time. She says it is, and I tell her I'll lie down with her. I've always found the sound of thunder comforting, even when it's barreling along at a Shakespearean level. But I was an English major.

She slides over to me, and I hold her tight. “It scares me,” she says. I squeeze her closer and pat her head, wondering as I do it if there's any way of patting someone's head without seeming patronizing.

I close my eyes, eager to get back to sleep. But she's watching the lightning flashes. “Here it comes again,” she says, and thunder shakes the house.

“Don't you leave me,” she says, and I assure her I won't. By daybreak, the thunder has subsided and she's still sleeping. I get up, adjust her pillow and make sure her shoulders are covered. Then I retrieve my phone and glasses to renew contact with the larger world.

I don't believe Norma has slipped any deeper into dementia over the last few weeks. Nor has she become routinely combative and despondent, as I feared she might. Her sense of humor is still sporadically intact, but she needs me to be physically closer than ever before. A couple of days ago, I had a writing assignment I couldn't delay until after she's gone to bed as I usually do. So I told her I'd be in our office. “Ok,” she said. But within the space of 10 or 15 minutes she twice stumbled down the hall in search of me. Later, I found her looking out the front window for me, although I never go outside the house without taking her with me unless someone else is in attendance.

We continue to look at movies—generally those from the 1960s—and I'm heartened by how attentive she is, even though she can't name any of the stars or tell me what happened on the screen a minute earlier. It's the music that gets to her. With “The Graduate,” it was “The Sound of Silence,” less so with “Mrs. Robinson.” “Midnight Cowboy” resurrected her dim memories of “Everybody's Talkin',” but it was “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” from “Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid” that really set her humming.

Tonight we watched “The Producers,” and while she didn't remember the song “Springtime for Hitler,” she did revel in the ridiculousness of the Nazi dance numbers. When we started the movie, she was sitting in her wheel chair and I was on the sofa. When I noticed her starting to slump, I helped her onto the sofa and moved over beside her. Since she was dressed in thin pajamas, I covered us with a blanket and put my arm around her. “I like that,” she said. I liked it, too.