Normal was watching television on any given night with my husband, usually programs like Ice Road Trucker or Axe Man, or his favorite TV preacher Joel Osteen. He wasn't into Sit-Coms or cop shows. Nature and History Channels were his favorite hangouts.
The new normal is me, alone, watching the CNN, the Good Wife and Gray's Anatomy. Drama with relationships in flux. Relationships where couples touch, and love and are together,mostly. We are not together, only every other day when I visit, eat lunch with him, read to him from Osteen or Chicken Soup for the Soul, Talk about our family, assure him that his cats love him, that I love him, that no one will ever take his place in my heart.
His thoughts these day take flights of fancy, delusions where he tells me 'someone' told him I got married,, so I assure him it isn't true and not to listen to 'those people.' Then he launchs into his latest conviction, that he lives part time in a tree house and an elevator takes him there and he wants me to visit with him. Then he asks me to bring his guitar to him, so David is fixing the strings and will bring it to him. He used to play the guitar, hasn't in years, but now wants it.
I brought him his typewriter so he can write the three books he claims to be writing during the night when he doesn't sleep. He worries about things...Lately it is 'the children.' We must always take care of the children he says.
Yesterday, one of the aides told me he counselled her the night before. She spent 30 minutes in his room where he told her to close her eyes and he led her on a mind trip and talked to her about things and she said he sounded like a real professional Counsellor. I told her he was for a long time and helped many people. She said he helped her. This,too, is our near normal life.
In the past year he had become a recluse, waiting to die, shutting out friends, clinging to only me and the cats, retelling his negative childhood, recalling injustices and hurts. It was an obsession. That was the old normal.
Today, he has regained his old sweetness in his new normal surroundings. The aides love him, he is a charmer. The owner of Mound told our neurologist at a recent visit that he was a sweet man and even his delusions were happy ones. I would have to debate that. Not when he was convinced he spent two years in a German Concentration camp, not when he believes I died, or other haunting fears. But they don't last and he returns to his tree house and me and tells me I am beautiful and that he loves me.
The heart breaker is when he talks of coming home. I know he is safe, and in kind hands. But he can't come home and that feels heartless. Thus the ambiguity of life in the new normal. God is my refuge, friends and family are my comfort. I pray Des feels the love poured out for him as well.
So says Sassy
He feels it, I know he does. We all do.
Your writing is beautiful, your words spoken with love. Thank you for sharing your heart.
Posted by: suzanne | October 07, 2012 at 08:54 PM