What now?

I thought it was going to be a good day. Adam was a happy child walking to school. Ted was downstairs working. I was upstairs working. May was having one of her better days. She'd been upstairs with me all morning, but had gone downstairs with the kind of purposeful look that made me think she was doing laundry or straightening up the kitchen. Then the phone rang and I saw the name of our neighborhood bank in the caller ID. They asked for William or May. I said I was William. They asked if May were in the house. I said she was. There was a long pause. I asked what this was about. They said someone claiming to be May had just been in the bank. I said, just a minute...

I walked downstairs. No May. I told the voice on the phone that May was not in the house. I said she has Alzheimer's. "I thought so," said the voice. "She left the bank. I'll see if we can catch her." I ran over and they had her. She was talking to a personal banker, drinking bank coffee. She saw me and said, "I didn't know where to find you." Well, maybe, but she has been asking me where our money was, was it safe, and could she see it.

We talked and she calmed down. We went to lunch and came back and had a decent afternoon. About 6 o'clock I told her I was going for a walk and did she want to come. She did. As has happened often lately, she pointed things out to me on our walk as if I were a stranger to the neighborhood. Toward the end of the walk she said, "So do you think you'll ever have kids?" I told her I thought I was through having kids. It seemed to bother her to learn that I had kids of my own. She walked quietly for another block and then said, "So are you going to stay around these parts for a while?" I said I was--I was going to stay here and take care of her. She asked me if I thought I would buy a house. I said no, I figured I would keep living with her. "Oh, I don't know about that," she said.

We've had this conversation before, and I usually go straight to the part about our being married, and she usually is happy to hear that. But tonight I thought maybe I could just play along and we'd get back home and she would realize that it was pretty normal to see me there in the house. But we were still a block from the house and the conversation was getting kind of sticky. So I said I was going to stay in the house with her because I was her husband and had been for 30 years.

She stopped dead in her tracks, waved her arms and said, "This is what makes me really, really mad. Why don't people tell me things? This is my life! Why don't I know this?" She cried the rest of the way home, asking "Where was I? How did I miss all this? Did I have friends? What did I do?" And so I said the things I've learned to say to restore her personal history. There was our house on Calder Court. There was the farm, and our dogs Butch and Ariel and your friends Barb and Abby and Becky and Judy and Colleen. There was the house by the river in Washington. There was our apartment by the lake in Chicago where Adam stood in the window and watched the boats. She does remember all those places, and is comforted to hear them named each in its turn.

Every day now is capable of bringing a new surprise. Finding out that she's been at the bank when you were certain she was downstairs is a big one. What now? Where are we in this deal? I think I'll see if the good people at Northwestern can tell me what I need to be doing.