SAG HARBOR
Fall 2014
I think a lot these days about what it means when I tell B. that I love her. If I’m going to be honest—and there’s no point in writing this book if I’m not—the love I feel for B. with Alzheimer’s isn’t the exact same love I felt for her on that wedding day twenty-two years ago, or even five years ago, before those first signs of difference seemed like anything more than the quirks of middle age.
B. is different. Life is different. My love is different, too. Yet what I’ve been thinking is that the love I feel for B. now is even deeper than the breathless excitement I felt when we first met. Passion for a beautiful, healthy partner is always a little narcissistic, you know? You feel that surge of happiness, your heart beats faster…those are the feelings in your chest, they’re about how love makes you feel. I’m not even sure that’s love. Maybe it’s just infatuation. Or if it is love, the scientists tell us, then what we’re feeling is pheromones—those biological exciters that buzz around our brains and bloodstreams, driving us to procreate and propagate the race. No matter how romantic you feel toward your lady love, pheromones last no more than eighteen months. That’s science, man, not poetry. After that, the love calms down because the job is done, biologically speaking: you’ve done your bit for the species! Or you haven’t, and those pheromones start swirling again as you encounter the next sexy vessel for your possible offspring.
Love for the woman you married becomes more about friendship and companionship than lust, and courtship is a memory in your rearview mirror, but that’s fine. More than fine. Until one of you gets seriously sick.
You have a wife with Alzheimer’s, and any last trace of frivolous romance goes away. What grows in its place is a new kind of love, a love that’s all about her, not about you. It’s about having her know you’re there for her, doing whatever she needs. It’s about caring for her, not abandoning her: to protect and to provide. I guess what they call that love is compassion. But that doesn’t seem a big enough word for the feelings it stirs.
B., I should add, loves me in a way that’s more profound, too. At least I think she does. She loves me as her husband, but also as her pillar of safety and support. She loves going with me and Bishop for a walk on the beach, sometimes talking, more often not; we have a new level of comfort with silence. She loves cooking with me, and curling up with me in bed to watch an old movie. Often, in one of those happy moments, she’ll tell me how grateful she is for all I’m doing for her, and what I’ll feel from her, when she does, is love of a kind as deep and devoted as mine for her.
Protect and provide—those are the watchwords for where we’re at now.