Like many who’ve had to deal with some pretty heavy stuff, I was constantly being thrust into the unknowns, knowns and figuring out how to live somewhere in between it all.
Take Alzheimer’s, then have it happen to a young healthy person in what should be their prime years.
My husband started leaving when he was forty nine.
It started with slight shifts in his behavior, personality, work ethic, and attitude towards life, us, and our family. Uncharacteristic mistakes, some costly, and a low grumbling of frustrations and complaints began his exit from who he was.
It took years to diagnose what had been causing this disconnect.
Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease chokes off a person’s sense of self and robs their loved ones of, well, the person they love.
The devious part of the disease is that he appeared to be healthy and the strategies he developed early on to mask his deficits were the very thing that eventually worked against him. Blurring what was real and what was not.
Even with his brain severely damaged, the sheer power of his human instinct to hide the weakness, frailties and sufferings fooled the best and the brightest right up until his death. The intricate nature of hope in all its glory and deceit became the roadblock I came up against.
He was in agony, angst-ridden, and the only person he let into his nightmare and pain was me. It took everything I had to convince those who could help, only to hear them say, “He seems fine.”
“Compared to what” became my anthem.
