I’m not unhappy, just emotional. I’m happy to be alive and run around as I want, but I still want to be that other person, too—the person I was before. She’s having a hard time.

I try not to make it anything big. I just want to get done what I’m supposed to do. It’s not the worst thing. We still have romance in our marriage. Sometimes people are in the same house and never talk to each other. We’re not like that. We have our moments, now, but we still love each other, and we still find things to laugh about together.

There’s a joke we have.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey what?” Dan says.

“I forgot I had Alzheimer’s.”

The thing of it is, I do sometimes forget I have Alzheimer’s because I feel normal, not because I’ve forgotten I have it. We can cook dinner together, watching the news on TV, and then sit down to eat, and Dan tells me what he’s been up to, and I nod the way I always do. I may not remember everything he tells me, but I never did before I had Alzheimer’s!

You know how it is in a marriage: sometimes you just listen to the sound of your husband’s voice. And that’s enough! Maybe if you heard every word, you’d get bored! But you love him, and you love his voice, and it sort of washes over you like a favorite song. That’s the way our dinners are now, not so different from how they once were.

And I enjoy what I’m eating as much as I ever did. Well, maybe not if I messed up cooking it, which I sometimes do these days. I never did cook much from recipes, I just knew what a dish needed, sort of like a musician having an ear. Now sometimes I put in the wrong spice, or I forget I put it in before, and put it in again. You forget you put in the hot pepper flakes, and put them in again, you’ll know it soon enough! But Dan usually cooks with me now, and keeps track of what I put in.

So the food is good—most of the time—and I don’t have any trouble using a knife and fork, which is something Dan seems to keep an eye out for, which I find annoying. And then we usually go to the TV room and watch a movie. Doesn’t all that seem normal, like just what everyone else does?

But then I get restless. I guess I have trouble following the movie if it’s a complicated plot. I can’t remember what came before. So I get up and go into my clothes closet to straighten my things. Or I take Bishop for a walk on the beach. I want to take that walk alone. I just need to be free for a while—on my own, not with Dan always standing over me. But he insists on coming, too, and so off we go, the three of us. If you saw us, coming the other way, maybe you had a dog, too, you’d think we were just a typical family, out for a walk with the dog. And in a way that’s what we are.