The Best Years of Our Lives

In follow-up to "Decennium Atrocius," I was thinking about something the other day that I probably should share. I'm just not sure how to do that without having a pity party, but I'll try:

Alzheimer's is an "awful, terrible, no good, very bad" disease (hat tip to Judith Viorst's excellent Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day). I think most everyone would agree with that statement. Most people who get Alzheimer's are elderly. But not all. My husband is in the second category.

As I look back on the past decade (plus), it occurs to me that probably the very best years of our lives have been stolen by this enemy. Our kids are out of school, planning and developing their careers, and establishing their own families. We worked hard and were looking forward to saving hard for the retirement we'd be enjoying in a few short years.

We'd thought about perhaps taking six months to travel from town to town and state to state (we live in the United States), renewing friendships with old friends who have moved away, seeing the beautiful sights along the way, enjoying each other's company, relaxing together, perhaps seeing again the places we'd particularly loved over the years. It was going to be wonderful, and I had even bigger dreams for us. Dreams where we walked along the coast in Ireland and visited ancestral villages in England and sat, hand-in-hand, at a little cafe in Paris while contemplating a trip to New Zealand or Bora Bora or other exotic locations. Just the two of us.

But, as you well know, our retirement doesn't look like that at all. In fact, it is "a perfect graveyard of buried hopes" (Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Maude Montgomery). I haven't spent a lot of time feeling sorry for myself during this trial by fire. Truly. Life is not fair, so why should it be fairer to me -- to us -- than to the next person? Every once in a while -- let's be real -- it does hit me like a ton of bricks. Even if, at some point, I were to be able to travel to every fantastic place in the world, do all sorts of phenomenal things, take thousands of photos, and write hundreds of blog posts, it just wouldn't be the same without my beloved.

And so my dreams have gotten smaller. They consist of hoping he will smile at me and recognize me when I enter the room. Perhaps he will even say something to me. I dream of being able to bring him home to care for him, but that is currently completely out of the question. I dream that I will walk into his room, and he will say, having packed all his things, "There you are! I feel so much better now. Where would you like to go? What would you like to do? Let's go home first, though, okay?"

It would be such a small thing for my God, Who created the universe by speaking it into being, to perform this miracle. But it would be such a big thing for me. It would be the biggest thing ever.