my husband was leaving me

My husband was leaving me.

Not for another woman, nor a man for that matter, nor an adventure on the high seas. No, his departure was involuntary, and vaguely charted. It was the kind of leave-taking that comes with the chemical changes in the brain due to a neurodegenerative disorder that looks like Parkinson’s Disease, but isn’t. No cure, veritably no treatment and prognosis: bad.

We first noticed that he stumbled often and fell outdoors. I joked that he had the knees of an eight-year-old boy from all of his scrapes.

Falls in the winter seemed easily explained by slippery streets. Reluctantly, he began using a cane to help with balance. We joked that the cane helped us board planes faster, but he really didn’t need a cane for walking. And then he began having minor mishaps in his car while always having been a good driver.

It was a fall backward into the gutter on a sunny autumn afternoon that couldn’t be attributed to ice and snow. The resulting gash on his head and trip to the emergency room started us on a circuitous road to the reasons for all these events.

At this point the diagnosis went back and forth between atypical Parkinson’s and Frontal Temporal Lobe dementia. Once Jack’s diagnosis was named and confirmed, I felt a mixed sense of both despair and affirmation. Relief that I didn’t have to constantly tell myself that I was imagining things, but despair from the knowledge of the irrevocable course that lay ahead.

In retrospect, I had seen the signs a few years after he retired, but no one else had noticed them. Sudden bursts of anger, lack of memory for significant events, brief states of confusion and difficulty finding his way in a foreign city when he had always been the one of us with an excellent sense of direction.

Little by little, the man who could tell you the composer of every classical work playing on the radio, present the history of Mexico or discuss the facts of corporate involvement in government, began to stumble over every word. He would work up a sweat to handle a simple telephone conversation with a loved one. Beyond his awareness that he could no longer take care of his checking account and other banking, he seemed to be oblivious to what was happening.

It was not just mental decline, but also physical deterioration and loss of mobility. Because of the deterioration of his judgment and some denial, too, efforts to provide physical therapy had limited usefulness.

At first I grieved over the gradual loss of his “executive functions,” then I had to deal with embarrassment and self-doubt handling his belligerent and combative behaviors in public.

It’s somewhat of a blur as to when he began taking out his distress on me. Grabbing me by the collar or shoulders and yelling at me for some fault that I couldn’t figure out what I had done. His belligerent episodes were totally unpredictable—it could be as simple as not liking what I had served for a meal.

I began to feel like a woman in an abusive relationship. He blamed me for everything and anything that didn’t suit his fancy. During one of these episodes he threw a glass of juice on me.

Whenever I would ask him, “What is upsetting you?” he’d say, “You, it’s all your fault!”

I did my best to keep him at home and honor my plan to take care of him until his death, but it became more and more difficult. I could no longer help him physically, nor could I tolerate his abusiveness. When his irrational episodes first started, he would later apologize when I told him what he had done.

In Jack’s moments of clarity, he was aware that living at home was becoming untenable, but when I told him of my gut-wrenching decision to admit him to a dementia unit, his distress was enormous. He knew living away was coming, but not so soon. We cried together.

At the nursing home, after trying many medications, his hostility abated, but so did his energy and verbal skills.

As I walked around our apartment I saw all of the clothes, books, CDs, papers that he will never wear, read or listen to. I cried for him, for how he was experiencing the death of his own personhood as I coped with being “half a widow.”

I asked myself, “Will becoming a whole widow feel any worse now that the Jack I married is gone?”

Jack died 19 months after entering the nursing home. And I have found that becoming a “whole widow” is no worse, and actually easier, than being “half a widow.”