Subterfuge

June 2018

Starting in a subterfuge way.  Don’t want to upset, scare or anger the snakes and ladders of life.  When one’s bright engaged spouse of 33 years begins to lose his memory.  Don’t panic.  Be Zen.  He is not contained in the details.  His sense of time floats.  Yesterday and today and tomorrow are interchangeable.  A continuous flow backwards and forwards.  What day is it?  Where does this go?  What is my grandchild’s name?  Where did I leave my credit card?

But he knows you.  He holds you.  He loves you.  He remembers you.  Until when?  What do any of us know?  Can we measure, predict, control anything?  Do we know if our son will die legless from diabetes on the streets of San Francisco, or in a random car crash at 30 years old?  Or if our lovely gentle daughter will commit suicide? Or be slaughtered with an automatic weapon at school in an American mass shooting? 

How do you withstand the sorrow?  How do you move the spouse who protects you into the spouse whom you must protect? 

Subterfuge.

Who can you talk to?  If you have cancer, your friends get that cancer look in their eyes.  Pity.  Fear.  Distance.  It may not be worth the conversation.  Except for those few who know how to ask the right questions, offer the right help when even you don’t know how to measure what is right.  And when your spouse loses his memory you don’t tell many people.  You are a lioness with a cub.  Fierce.  Protective.  But your cub is your husband.  How can that be?  Cubs are not husbands.  But yes, this husband is your cub.  But no, he is your protector.  He was always your protector.  One of the reasons you were attracted to him.  He was a survivor.  A Korean Vet.  A Black American Male who made White People Laugh and Love Him.  Not Fear Him.  Not be threatened by him.  He made it in a white man’s world, not an easy feat.  He was smart and educated and well-travelled and artistic—but also a computer geek who could fix anything.  A Renaissance man, in fact.

Falsehoods between Blacks and Whites.  Between men and women.  Are men really stronger?  Physically, mostly yes.  Emotionally, mostly no.  Even, physically not always.  My brothers, for example.  Sensitive wimps.  Lovely wimps.  Talented wimps.  But wimps, nevertheless.  I know some Black wimps too.  My husband is not one of them.  His brother, my brother-in-law, a 200-pound black man (definitely not a wimp), does not believe that women are delicate. That I am delicate.  He sees me handling things. He does not question whether I can.  He comes from a black family with five powerful women, my sisters-in-law, who handled things. Raising children as single parents.  Earning degrees.  Working.  Owning homes.  All with their senses of humor intact.

I am no longer delicate.  I once was.  Truly delicate.  110 pounds.  Clueless.  An emotional twining fork.  An immigrant.  The middle child of a narcissistic mother.  Think minefields.  Think introvert.  Think paper-thin. And now a new term I just learned: Highly Sensitive Person.  Really.  There are articles about us.  Google it if you don’t believe me.  In the old days you were just an emotional wreck.  Now, well, there is a body of knowledge behind you.  A body of knowledge that normalizes you.

Nevertheless, I survived adolescent and young adulthood.  Sans safety net.  Arriving in America, alone, with only a backpack.  No job.  No money.  No family backing.  Because, Jewish though we were, we were poor and strewn across 3 continents.  But what I got instead was:  Grit.  Determination.  Education.  The myth of the rich, cutthroat Jews.  The myth of the ignorant, primitive Blacks.  Stereotypes.  They catch us in their vice. 

My husband.  My hero.  He has it too—grit, determination, education and a great love of people.  And uncanny sensitivity.  That may be the American Indian part of him.  He is like a tuning fork, too, even more than I ever was.  He still reads people.  He may not know their name, but he knows their essence.

And now, facing as I do, the unraveling of my strongman, I see that I am stronger than I ever thought possible.  When I find plates and silverware, or computer cords in strange places.  Or the water in our Lab’s bucket, running, running, running down the hill because my beloved has forgotten to shut it off.  Or the knife in the spoon drawer.  Or the spoon, hanging on the wall.  Or the eiderdown neatly tucked under the mattress cover.  Or the computer network cable cord disconnected from something crucial.   

But he is still himself.  Funny.  Smart. Ironic.  So, he forgets what day it is or what I just said to him or where he was headed?  So he forgets.  His soul is deep.  His heart is wide.  His arms are loving.  He still reads The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the LA Times every morning.  Maybe not every article, but who does?

But still, there is a loss.  Who can I talk to about that?  One of my friends never brings it up.  And so, neither do I.  You, my beloved readers, are the ones who will hold these truths.  You are the ones who will see me through this.  

  

Things to understand.  He is so Zen.  Even though he asks me many times a day what day it is, the answer never perturbs him.  He takes it all in his stride.  Oh, it’s Sunday.  I didn’t know that.  Leaving the hose on in the dog’s bucket, water running down the hill.  I didn’t know I did that.  Confusing the days, the weeks, the years.  Forgetting his great nieces and nephews and great grandkids names and who, truly, they belong to.  Some are the survivors of his divorce from his first wife whom he still loves, and so do I.  She, and his 3 surviving kids, live in another city.  They were angry and out of touch for years.  It is better now.  Together, we mourned the death of his only son, for whom my sister planted a tree in Israel, where she lives.  That meant a lot to all of them.  We spent a Thanksgiving together.  We were part of his eldest daughter’s wedding.  His daughters came and spent time with us.  Now, we are family.

He still celebrates watching the Lakers.  He loves to watch tennis, too, which he used to play every single day for years and years.  He celebrates having breakfast with me, his wife.  He celebrates my creativity and our home on the hill.  He celebrates looking out of our front window.  He celebrates being an American.  A good American, one who believes in the Constitution and how immigrants have built this great country.  How children should never, ever be torn from their parents.  He celebrates every second of his life, really.   Seconds that I often miss.  He celebrates how good life has been to him.  And how good it still is.

I try not to be anxious about all the stops and curves and potholes ahead.

Maybe these shifts—memory loss, losing capacity, slowing down, death—that we stress about—well, maybe these are the things that bring us closer to the stars and earth and the water from which we come.  The things that help us embrace the end of our corporeal lives.  That help us to move to the next plane of whatever it may be.  Dust.  Reintegration with the earth.  Heaven.  What if those who lose their memories are the true gods?  And us fighting to make them more like us is what causes such distress?  If we just accepted it, they would not suffer.  They are sensitive to our shifts and turns and dead ends. 

I refuse to use the names that are given. Dementia.  Alzheimer’s.   So concrete.  Vise-like.  Suffocating.  It misses the point and causes distress. I believe that they are closer to the divine. Where present and past have no demarcations.  Where song and art and happiness reign supreme.  Where, what one remembers one has, is what one is grateful for.

I am grateful for him.  He is deep.  He is joyous.  He is forgiving.  He is funny.  He connects equally to the restaurant server and the busboy and the homeless man on the street.  I, on the other hand, am too private.  Too introverted.  I sometimes struggle to maintain my sense of joy.  I worry tremendously about too many things. I am too cognizant of past, present and future.  And time.  And days.  And demarcations.  And structure.  Lately, I am trying to shake all of that with charcoal drawing and painting and writing.  Although one needs to know the demarcations and structure before one can let go and let the joy and passion shine through. But there is no doubt.  It is those who can let go who are the true artists. 

I lie awake at night and try to let go. 

Sometimes it works.