“So, fall asleep love, loved by me … .for I know love, I am loved by thee.”
~Robert Browning
Could I have been so naïve? So worldly in the good and evil ways of man and yet, so blind to how The Disease would silently slide between us and destroy our coming together. There was logic to not believing.
Alzheimer's often attacks the frontal lobe of the brain, and the desire for sex must come from some more primal part of the brain. At least that's how I would have explained it had someone asked me. But no one asked, and no one warned me that this, too, was a sacrifice that The Disease would not demand or discuss. It would just take.
We were blessed with being two people who couldn't keep their hands off each other. We would touch and hold and kiss just because we passed each other in the kitchen. Jan was beautiful, a true five-foot-two blonde, pin-up curvy. She was sensual and spirited, and made it very clear she wanted me, just me. Such are these blessed things when you are a man, a husband, and a lover.
Our lovemaking was sometimes slow and easy and sometimes quick and instant, as I sought for her release that left her satisfied and the more hungry for me, and me for her. And then we would find in each other the chance to be as one, to hold each other and feel that these two bodies could, if only for that instant, share one soul.
I don't know when it changed, not the year or the feeling. It crept in, unspoken, un-thought. Do we not all have moments when our lover, our dearest friend, feels ever so slightly distant? Distracted? But the distance didn't go away. Sometimes it felt like I had beaten it back a little, had gotten through to her. Sometimes … not.
At first I blamed myself, and that was okay. I could do it better, find something more creative. I read books and articles looking for ideas and then tried them. It didn't work. That is when I realized that we were losing our intimacy. What God had joined together, The Disease was putting asunder. And thus began a whole new descent for me, driven by knowing this was another something that I could neither control nor change.
It wasn't just loneliness; it was an enforced, unwanted isolation. Our lovemaking had always been a strong connection, as it is between any two people who love each other. Without it, I began feeling adrift and confused over what to do about this. I never expected to feel alone when I was with Jan, but now I did even with her beside me because I was without this connection, this closeness, the moments that made the two of us into one.
And what about Jan? Did she understand what The Disease was doing, how it was forcing us apart … how she was going away and how scared that made us both feel?
She knew. I'm sure of it. Not with words, necessarily, but with her instinct and her eyes. She knew it the time we were tangled and locked together and I looked down at her and was stunned to see her eyes wide open, staring hard and unblinking at me. Not with passion or pleasure, but as if she was trying to freeze this exact moment in her mind—that if she stared hard enough and long enough she could remember this moment a day or just an hour from now.
I gathered her in my arms and told her how much I loved her, and then held her long after there was nothing left to say. I stayed that way until she found comfort in sleep. There were still occasional times when I could touch her and the woman inside would find her hunger for me, and we would be together, the way I once believed would never end. But it was ending.
Is this too much to share, to know about Early Onset Alzheimer's? But there is more.
As The Disease progressed, she became more unsure of herself and more dependant on me to make almost every decision for her, unable to decide such simple things as what sandwich she wanted at a restaurant. I became less a husband and more like a father to a child; she was growing younger and simpler. How could I approach her, how could I make love with Jan when her magnificent sensual womanhood was ebbing away?
I would touch her—by now, it was always me starting this—and she would roll over and put her hand on me. She would stroke my chest, up and down, up and down. And I realized she wasn't making love. She had forgotten what we were doing, what was next, how to touch me. She had forgotten her desire. At first I would guide her hands. But as time went on, I would just let her hand slowly brush my chest until her eyes closed and she drifted into sleep. The Disease had taken this away from us. There was no revenge to exact, no one to blame, no point to anger.
It is surprising what a person will accept. Maybe we say we do it out of love, and that would be sweet and nice to believe. But I accepted this because there was no other choice. And I still had her in my life, as much as she could be. If this one part was gone, the private passion that brings together two people who love each other, then my job was to adjust, and so I did. I think about her now and how we made a thousand nights of memories. We used to joke about how we would chase each other around the old folks' home strapped in our wheelchairs because surely our passion would never end. I think of all the nights that should have been, all the memories we were yet to make.
They, too, are gone.