A Blessing
When my husband and I were first dating, he had a stent put in his heart and was overnight in the University of Michigan Hospital. As I wheeled him down to my car the next morning, he said “Thank you for taking care of me. There will be many more times when you will have to do this if you stick around.” About this, he was right and we both knew it. But I was 54 and he was 63. Young by aging standards. And we were hopeful and in love.
We could not see our journey but we could guess at parts of it. As a male, nine years my senior, he would start to feel the physical limitations of aging before me. He already had heart trouble and we could guess that he would have more of that. I still felt mostly like superwoman and hoped that I would continue to feel that for at least the next twenty years. And who knew how long we would have together.
Would we have embarked on our life together if we had seen all of the twists and turns ahead of us? I’d already been married twice so knew that there would be pitfalls, even if I didn’t know what they would be. My husband had been single for twenty years when I met him and had dated many women. He, at least, knew the perils of any intimate relationship. He said he would take care of me for the rest of our lives. I insisted on marriage.
For at least 15 of our 26 years together he continued to play tennis and ski, argue with his political discussion group cronies, and pinch his pennies. I continued for 13 years to pretend that I was superwoman until my first treatment for cancer. That scared both of us more than our age difference. Maybe I would die first. That had been nowhere in the plan.
A few years ago it was clear to me that my husband was losing some cognitive ability. He was diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment, which we both mostly ignored. The neurologist couldn’t tell us whether the condition would be stable or would progress to something more serious. Last Friday, his doc called to review his latest PET scan. His new diagnosis is Progressive Supranuclear Palsy a rare condition that mimics Alzheimer’s in some ways and Parkinson’s in others.
My own cancer, still treatable and not life threatening, is more frequently apparent. We’re 80 and 89 now, in good shape, our electrician says, for our age. Where the journey leads from here is predictable, but the pathway is still unknowable. It will take us home. We know that much.
