“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
I have been blogging in one form or another for a quarter of a century, and I have probably based articles around that quote more than any other.
If there is an irony to it, it’s that I am not a particular fan of the man who wrote it in one of his most famous novels. In fact, I haven’t read much of Ernest Hemingway’s work. Two that come to mind are “The Sun Also Rises” and “The Old Man and the Sea.”
“The world breaks everyone” came from “A Farewell to Arms,” and there have been several people in my life who are good, gentle and brave who have been attacked again and again by the world. Me, I’m neither good, gentle or brave and I’ll probably live to be 90.
But even if the world waits to kill me, it is certainly doing its worst to break my heart. My wife Nicole, who has been the center of my world for more than 32 years of marriage, may have slept in our house that she loves so much for the last time.
We were fortunate 10 years ago when she was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia and the diagnosis turned out to be wrong. We had eight pretty good years after that, and we took a wonderful cruise with Pauline, her husband Johnathan and our six grandchildren at Christmas 2023.
A few months after that, Nicole started slipping away. It has become obvious the last couple of months that she is suffering from dementia and that it is getting worse. Nothing makes me angrier than seeing this happening. Nicole had a world-class mind and is the smartest person I have ever known.
Watching her lose all that is beyond heartbreaking. She has been showing some of the symptoms of dementia — sundowning and wandering to name two.
Nicole in 2005
She has started falling frequently and Monday she fell and hit her head in the parking lot on the way to the Emergency Room. She has been in the hospital for four days now and I don’t think she will be coming home.
The plan now is that she will go to a rehab center for up to 20 days while we work to get her into memory care in a nursing home. It may cost us in the low six figures for a year of care, and we are blessed to be able to afford it.
We may not leave much to our children, but the fact is they’re both far better off financially than we are.
At this point, they want the same thing I want — to make what remains of their mother’s life as pleasant as possible.
It might be the least we can do, but sadly, it’s also the most we can do.