It Can't be This Way Everywhere
"It will come about gradually," the doctor had said. "You remember, Daniel, what it was like with your mother?"
"We thought it was her accident," he said. "We thought that's what - damaged -- her."
Alzheimer's, Ruth thought, still as marble beside him. Still as if the doctor was speaking to someone else's husband.
Daniel's mother had fallen off a stepladder. Her concussion had been so severe, she suffered migraines for years.
"When she started forgetting things, we just assumed," he said later as Ruth lay beside him. "She did crossword puzzles, sent Christmas cards to families they had been stationed with when my father was in the Army and never forgot a street address."
That first month, he catalogued memories for her as if to prove everyone wrong - the button missing off his flannel jacket when he was ten, the Estee Lauder eau de toilette scent of his first girlfriend's neck, the only line of lyrics skipped over in either of the Blonde on Blonde albums. About his illness and what would be required of her, Ruth never said, I can't do this. Other people said it, said that she had many strengths, but she wasn't cut out to take that kind of care of anyone. It was true, she was not overly patient, but she had been an accomplished child in a family of accomplished children. When she heard she wasn't something, she wanted, more than anything, to be that. Besides, she thought, I haven't had to do this yet. Now that she did, they would see.
Bur first, she had to leave him. She stood in the airport with Daniel whose secretary had to log him into his computer most mornings. His home phone number was taped to the dashboard of his car. He can still get the children home safe, Ruth thought, and keep them that way for a month. She would be back to witness all the ways that her forty-eight year old husband would become her neediest child. The fellowship had been in the works for a year, the money appropriated, the institute expecting her. She and Daniel had come to the decision together. But she knew what her leaving looked like...
Carla Paciera, it can't be this way everywhere, fiction
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Very touching, Wheel. The sense of impending doom, gradual however it may be. Whose plight is going to be greater? Ruth's or Daniel's?
I think Alzheimer's is one of the most terrifying diseases. It melts away the person you love and leaves the shell untouched. This story was so poignant it was hard to read all the way through.
I especially liked the metaphor of the feral cat and the kittens.