And Then There's This... Norma: Scenes from a Marriage

This is the June 17, 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.

She so wants something that she begins to tremble, something she can't bring into focus through the kaleidoscopic shards of her broken memory, something she can't find a name for even as her lips struggle to cast it into words. She leans forward like a tree breaking its roots, her thin right arm extended toward the television screen, a sycamore limb in winter reaching for the sun.

We are watching a DVD of clips from Glen Campbell's “Goodtime House,” a show we both doted on when it premiered in 1969. And there it is again — the radiant, immaculately groomed singer crooning out “Galveston,” “Wichita Lineman,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” Norma wants to absorb the music, to be at one with its transcendent glory. To ride it like a raft until she's escapes the darkness that relentlessly closes in on her. “I wish,” she begins, and I long for her to finish the thought. But she can only look at me with anxious eyes and slump back in defeat.

It's at times like these that I feel the sorriest for her. Wouldn't it be wonderful if she heard a song so central to her brain that the clouds vanished? My troubles are small change compared to what she's going through. The other day, as we sat side-by-side and motionless in the living room — a caricature of senile decay — she said, “I just want to kill myself.”

“I hate you!” she seethes as I put my hand under her left arm pit and try to lift her from her bathroom perch. This is the first time she's said that to me in 60-plus years of marriage; and I would be crushed by it if I didn't recognize it as a reflex cry of pain from a wounded animal I've somehow hurt her in the lifting, and she has neither the patience nor vocabulary to be more measured in her complaint.

There's a rising desperation in her mood these days. It's almost like she senses the end of being able to tell me anything at all that I can act on. She tries so hard to get messages — urgent messages — across to me, only to see them drop away into unmatched syllables. Aggravating her sense of impotence is the fact that she's more physically dependent. I have to assist her in standing and sitting and going to the bathroom, and sometimes I actually feed her as her coordination gets shaky.

Watching the avuncular Mark Shields on the “PBS News Hour,” she tells me twice within a span of five minutes, “I like that man.” I wonder what she sees or associates with his voice, his pose, his hang-dog face. It's certainly not his commentary since she's lost all grasp of news as narrative. I have to explain to her each day about the Covid virus and quarantine, but the explanation never sticks.

She instinctively likes the wooden Steven Seagal, too, in “Fire Down Below” and Jerry Reed as the carefree truck driver in “Smokey & The Bandit.” Like Willie Nelson's “Stardust,” these two movies have become emotional staples. But it's only the transformative Willie she returns to each night. About me, she's not sure. But I think we're still pals.