Learning What We Don't Want to Know

Learning is largely a voluntary affair. We pursue the things we want to know and take the steps to learn them. Then there is the stuff we don't want to know. What I call involuntary learning. What does it feel like to lose a job? Undergo chemo? Bury a child? Those things that forcibly insert themselves into your life like foreclosure or violent crime. What is that like?

I found out. It was two-years ago today that I became a widower. It was the worst day of my life—and that was with the knowledge my wife's battle with early-onset Alzheimer's only had one outcome.

(Prior to that, I learned what it was like to be a twenty-four/seven care-giver. The stress and fitful sleep aside, that was only the second-hardest thing I ever did.)

You see, my wife was the most luminous soul I had ever met, and to my utter disbelief she liked me. She thought I was funny and smart and nice. Not counting the six-months or so we worked together before becoming a couple, we spent something like twelve-thousand twenty-one days together. For me, she was it.

Naturally, it wasn't all unicorns and rainbows. No marriage is. For example, frustrated one day by my bottomless enthusiasm for washing and waxing cars, she said to me (as only a wife can) “If I put the %$#@! bathroom on four wheels will you clean it then?”

Yeah, she could be a pistol. More often, she was the person who couldn't continue a walk because we'd come across a rabbit who'd been critically injured by a car and who wouldn't sleep until it was attended to by a veterinarian.

Or the one who whipped up a pan of double-chocolate brownies while I was in the backyard one hot summer afternoon, attempting to clear it of bindweed.

So yes, taking care of her was a no-brainer. And to my eternal surprise, it gave me a sense of purpose I had never known. Her descent was a slow one, which gave me time to adapt to the latest round of changes. And unlike many Alzheimer's patients, her personality never altered. There was no acting out, no violence.

We were largely able to continue our lives as a couple. We continued to make our weekly trip to Jewel and go to Lincoln Park Zoo and the CSO and just be together (something which I now understood had an expiration date).

The Great Recession had kicked us down a long flight of stairs, to the point where we lived in my parent's basement. But even that misery contained a silver lining: she was next to me. Things like holding her hand, kissing her hair and having her in my arms became impossibly redolent. Decadent, even.

She was an island of comfort in a sea of shit.

Nothing changed after the onset. The here and now—having her with me—was everything.

The emotional contours of care-giving feature guilt. Exhaustion. Anger. Hopelessness. Self-doubt. Endless adjustments. Even after my wife had entered hospice, I reflexively responded to her CNA's remark that I was a good care-giver with the thought “Then why isn't she getting better?”

The cruel reality, newly reinforced, haunted me deep into the night. Tears and vodka flowed.

Yes, I was learning.

It shouldn't have been surprising that my wife, who was probably the most-intelligent person I had ever known, was still teaching me.

Then, on a damp, overcast Thursday afternoon, she was gone.

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Death brings with it a whole new understanding of the word 'forever'.

It answers questions, such as how can survivors hand over ludicrous sums of money to people they believe can contact their loved ones?

It makes you wish for incredibly mundane things. Things like sitting next to each other watching TV. Or hearing a giggle—one last time.

Depending on your spiritual inclination, it may even challenge your notion of the afterlife. For example, even as a lapsed Lutheran, I refused to believe my wife was just...gone. How could all she said and thought and felt—all that she was—just be gone?

The answer, of course, is that it isn't. It's in me.

Lucy? You were a place.

And whenever I was with you, I was home.

Giving Care

I guess you could call it reconnecting. After spending time with your father and brother mostly in tidy, digestible six-hour nuggets for the past two or three decades, you’re again living with them.

Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week.

You’ve forgotten how utterly slovenly your brother is. Where the phylum housekeeping is concerned, your brother is a genus unto himself, with no known connection to the remainder of mankind.

You wonder why there are two rolls of toilet paper on his bathroom floor, but a bare cardboard cylinder in the wall-mounted dispenser. You wonder what the black stuff creeping up the sliding glass shower doors is.

And you wonder what he thinks a towel rack is for after you spy a mound of towels (interspersed with dirty laundry) heaped on the bathroom counter. The ring of facial hair that circles the sink is revolting.

Your regard for humanity prohibits you from detailing the condition of the toilet.

You peer into his bedroom.

After successfully locating a government-issue Haz-Mat suit, you venture inside. You find yourself subconsciously developing a business plan for a second-hand clothing store after taking in the closets-full of clothing strewn about.

You believe this room is carpeted, but are unable to find a patch of floor not covered by the ephemera that has fallen, leaf-like, from the tree of your brother’s life.

While you have the back-up discs for your computer’s operating system carefully stored in paper sleeves in a small file box, your brother has seen fit to let them lie where they fell or were dropped. They lie alongside the CD-Rs of music you laboriously compiled and labeled for his listening enjoyment and innumerable discs of once-important data.

Some are even unscratched.

There is enough change on the floor to buy a new car. You want to pick it up and pocket it, but the Haz-Mat suit prohibits this.

And the laundry hamper your sister bought and labeled with a sign reading DIRTY CLOTHES GO HERE stands empty, as forlorn as a clearance-priced Christmas ornament that has lingered on store shelves into late-January.

Yet he won’t touch the sponge in the kitchen sink, and instead grabs three or four dozen paper towels to gingerly, almost delicately, wipe the remains of a lasagna dinner from his dinner plate because he knows, with unshakeable certainty, that the sponge is laden with deadly bacteria and fatal viruses.

Upon getting up in the morning, you can trace the path of his nocturnal eating forays by the trail of cellophane, half-empty cookie boxes, glasses and empty soda containers scattered throughout the house.

Albert Einstein would reportedly become so involved in his calculations he would forget to eat. You aren’t that lucky.

You find tolerance more-easily for your father, he having recently survived a year-long bout with C-diff, the installation of a pacemaker, unsuccessful knee-replacement surgery and the mild dementia that is the byproduct of his advancing years.

Yet you are forcibly returned to adolescence when you take him to the doctor and discover anew his ability to discern upcoming potholes, road debris and to measure the distance between you and the car ahead of you.

Without access to the speedometer, he can assess your speed and the threat it poses to Western Civilization. Even more remarkably, he can calculate the g-forces you generate as you corner and brake.

After several trips, you are tempted to suggest that he seek employment with a car magazine, as his ability to perform these calculations internally would surely save them a great deal of money on testing equipment.

Then there is the issue of food. It is a big one.

Your father, being the product of a certain generation, is essentially helpless in the kitchen. Conversely, he lives to eat. This creates a sizeable quandary when, for the first time in your parent’s marriage, your mother is hospitalized.

But between hospital visits, setting-up in-home after care, shopping, chauffeuring, cleaning and fielding a myriad of phone calls, all while trying to perform a job search and maintain a suddenly long-distance relationship, you are only marginally inclined to cook.

By dinner time, a bottle of beer and a frozen entrée are pretty much all you’re able to muster. You wonder how your mom did it.

While your vision of hell frequently involves either employment or the lack of it, your father’s is nine straight days of prepared food.

His stoicism soon turns to grousing and finally, a form of pleading, which wears the unmistakable scent of desperation. You relent and dine out. You make a mental note to at least sprinkle some basil and tomato on the next frozen pizza.

You smile at the irony of having told your father, in the gentlest manner possible, that money doesn't grow on trees.

But you eventually realize it’s not all fear of sponges and back seat driving.

Evening frequently finds the three of you together in the quiet repose of a good book, or held captive in the flickering light of an absorbing movie. It is an experience not frequently known, and one that silently joins the three of you.

Certain personality traits have resisted time, like the cap rock atop mesas and buttes. They endure, like stubborn sentrys.

You make your peace with them, because they are you and you are them.