A Tribute to My Beloved Ex-Wife

 

This month my ex-wife will have her 57th birthday. It won’t be much of a celebration though. She suffers from Alzheimer’s.

In December, 2002, she divorced me. It was a smart thing for her to do. I must acquiesce to her family’s belief that I was not a good husband. My ideas about being a devoted and loving husband were offset by my ignorance of how to actually be that. I just could not seem to get it right. During the course of our twelve-year marriage, she showed incredible patience and love for me. After a time, it was inevitable that we would part ways.

Now that I’m on the left side of the country and she’s on the right, time and distance have not lessoned my love for her. Even though I made a mess of things when we were together, I cannot and will not let go of her in my mind. I will forever love her.

The most difficult deed I ever performed was to leave my home in northern Arizona, travel to our old house in Littleton, Colorado and take care of things on her behalf. Prior to that, I had gone through one of the worst times of my life. After the divorce, I completely fell apart. But through it all my ex-wife remained encouraging and supportive of me. She did not let on to me, her siblings, or her friends that anything was wrong with her. While I was going through this difficult time, I was suicidal. Her words to me over the phone lines, I am convinced, saved my life more than once. “Woe is me!” was my new name. It was all about me. It never dawned on me that things could be tough for her too. Once again, I proved how selfish I was, I never learned.

After fourteen months of this, I began to catch on that something was amiss. She began asking me to repeat my words just seconds after hearing them. She would not remember an appointment of some sort from one day to the next. She had worked as a dental hygienist for over thirty years. Suddenly her boss cut her work hours to just twelve per week. Unbeknownst to me or anyone else, she began dipping into her retirement funds to pay her bills. By the time we discovered what was going on, her savings were all gone.

I began to quiz her on various topics but was chagrined when I would hear her respond in a somewhat mangled fashion. I called her sister and inquired about her health.  I was told that she had recently been diagnosed as being in the latter stages of Alzheimer’s. I immediately made plans to drive to her home and prepare her for a move to an assisted-living facility near her five siblings. I wanted desperately to bring her to my home so that I could take care of her. After all, she had given so much to me but her doctor insisted that she would get much better care back East where she would have a supportive family around her.

Her parents had long since passed away.  She’s the baby girl of the group.  She has a younger brother but she was the sweetest of them all.  Growing up, she had what was much later diagnosed as learning difficulties.  Among other things, she was dyslexic which made it extremely difficult to grasp concepts as they were presented in school.  But through it all, she persevered.  Not only did she go on to obtain her undergrad in English, she continued onto Dental School where she became licensed to practice hygiene.  She was, and is, simply remarkable.

When I arrived at our old home, I found that she had been living like a hermit. She had not allowed visitors to her home.  She had always been very particular about the cleanliness of the house so when I saw the condition it was in, I was dismayed to realize she had been suffering for a very long time and no one knew it. Over the course of the next week, I carried out twelve large garbage bags stuffed with junk mail that had accumulated. Her explanation was she could not figure out what was important so she kept everything. I prepared the house to be sold, sold her car, and put in storage irreplaceable items (photographs, documents, etc.) until they could be shipped to her new home in the East.  I then got her (and our dog, Buckie) ready to fly.

It was the most crushing experience of my life. I had to put her on a plane in Denver with the likelihood that I would never see her again. Her siblings had all pitched in to purchase her a first-class ticket so that she would get watched over more closely by the flight attendants. After she walked down the gangway, I went up to a woman in a United Airlines uniform to tell her that my ex-wife was in the throes of this insidious disease and would need to be cared for during her travels. I wanted to make it clear that they were not to discuss her condition with her, they were only to ensure that she was alright and that when she arrived at her destination nothing was left behind. Those were my intentions but when I began to speak to her, the tears came and didn’t stop for the next hour.

Her family has decided that I should remain outside her life. And, maybe they are right but I will never stop loving her. She is in my heart and that is where she will stay. I pray to God that she finds peace and comfort in whatever time she has left on this earth. It is simply not fair that bad things happen to good people. It should have been me.

Technorati : Alzheimer’s, love, saying goodbye

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