Her adjustment has been pretty good – the staff members are the kindest people you could hope for. But the staff enveloped her with love, and she didn't protest when we left. It seemed heartbreakingly cruel to walk away and leave her with a flimsy excuse. We stayed for about an hour, then said we had to run an errand. My daughters and I dropped her off at the facility we'd picked – a two-story suburban home with eight residents that didn't feel like an institution. Because even though I had the support of our medical team and our daughters, I had to make the decision on my own and couldn't ask her to weigh in. It was the hardest moment of our married life – harder than living through Marsha's breast cancer treatment, sadder than losing our parents. Marsha moved in June – on our anniversary. It seemed that the time had come to consider a residential facility. Negotiating our home had also become a challenge. By spring it was clear that traveling by air would be incredibly difficult – her pace had slowed, her cognitive abilities had slipped, her spells of agitation, prompted by noise and unfamiliar places, had increased. When we flew to New York for a funeral last December, Marsha's gait was slow but we negotiated the airport without too much difficulty. It steals a person's abilities, sometimes so slowly you're not aware and sometimes with a startling decline in mere weeks. At first the symptoms were mild and we were able to keep taking trips - mainly to Utah to visit our grandchildren and to California, where our younger daughter moved in 2021.īut dementia did what it always does. Our traveling life entered an unwelcome new stage when Marsha was diagnosed with dementia a few years ago. When one of us flailed, the other would come to the rescue – like that time I led us in the wrong direction in search of our hotel on a winding road in Positano, Italy, until Marsha wisely suggested an about-face. We shared blissful moments – I'll never forget those night stars above the canyon's North Rim - and conquered obstacles. We have traveled together to so many places around the world and in the U.S., from bigtime tourist draws like Paris and the Grand Canyon to the teeny tiny island of Simi, Greece. Marsha and I have been married over 40 years. Would I take my first leisure trip without my wife in.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |