I have been married and living in the same house with someone for more than 32 years.
In two weeks, one of those two things will come to an end.
My wife Nicole, the love of my life since we met in 1992, will be moving 10 miles up the road to a nursing home with memory care where she can get 24-hour, seven-day-a-week care for what has been a worsening condition that is an as yet undetermined form of dementia.
Is it Alzheimer’s? We don’t know.
Is it Lewy Body? We don’t know.
Is it vascular? We don’t know, although an MRI done last week showed some of the signs of that form.
The truth is, it doesn’t matter. None of them are curable or reversible, and in the last few months we have seen almost all the symptoms — hallucinations, memory problems, wandering, sundowning and others.
All I can say is that it’s heartbreaking. I have been telling Nicole all through our years together that she is my favorite person in the world. And while she has many fine qualities, her brilliant mind is what really makes her stand out.
2004
So of course this woman with a truly amazing mind has the misfortune to age with something that attacks her mind.
I have written before about some of the details of what’s happening and I don’t want to go into them here. I knew we had reached the point where keeping her at home would no longer be safe. We needed to find a place where Nicole could live with 24/7 nursing available and I could visit her every day.
It took a while, but we had the best daughter in the world doing the search for us and she came through in a big way. Pauline found us a nursing home that scored on all counts.
Reasonably priced? Less that two-thirds of what we were told to expect.
In good condition? How about brand new, open for less than a month and with an impressive staff.
Convenient to me? Most of the places we learned of are 25-30 miles away or even farther. This one is 9.9 miles portal to portal and takes about 15 minutes to get to.
It’s called the Canopy at Westridge and we toured it today. I don’t want to gush or overpraise, but it is everything we could have wanted, with the only minor disappointment being that the studio apartment Nicole will call her own is completely unfurnished.
That’s not a problem. We’ve got everything we need, although it will leave us with one room nearly empty.
So all that’s really left to do is get things together and move her into the Canopy 12 days from now.
Then I’ll make the 9.9-mile trip home and for the first time in more than 32 years, I’ll be living alone.
In a house where everything in every room reminds me of Nicole.