Not a Clue

I must admit to being slightly annoyed when I saw my husband’s name on the caller ID as I sat at my desk working. Personal phone calls during the workday have never been my favorite. As I picked up the phone, the voice of my usually very calm husband had a decided edge. He told me I needed to come home immediately because there had been a fire.

My first thought: What in the world has he done now? But the stress in his voice caused me to jump and run. I became increasingly nervous as I drove the 20 minutes home. Fire trucks surrounded our house as I arrived. Firemen were wandering through our kitchen gathering clues. Their detective skills didn’t have to be too sharp that day as my husband readily admitted he was the culprit. You see he had put french fries in a pot of grease and went to the living to watch television while they cooked. You guessed it. He forgot all about them. The next thing he knew the kitchen was engulfed in a grease fire.

Maybe I should have known that day that something was wrong, but I was annoyed and wondered how my sweet husband could have been so careless. After all, he had been the cook in the house for years and had never set the kitchen on fire before. I gave him a “choice” name in my head and rolled my eyes at the firemen as they continued their clean-up.

That was the first of two kitchens my husband burned. Both times he was engrossed in television when he should have been in the kitchen. It reminds me of what my mom used to tell me, “You can’t cook from the living room.” For as clueless as I was after the first fire, my suspicions about my husband’s memory loss were growing stronger each day by the time the second kitchen went up in flames.

That’s how it is for most of us. We don’t have a clue what is happening when dementia starts. Medical professionals have determined people with dementia often don’t show signs of the disease until several years after it has taken root in their brains. And caregivers, who generally have never seen dementia up close and personal, don’t see the signs until their loved one is well into the condition.

For me, it wasn’t until I was working as an intern at the Alzheimer’s Association that I began to see the light. I was counseling caregivers who were struggling to discover what they were dealing with and what to do about it. Near the end of the internship, I walked into my supervisor’s office and told her I was living the life of those I was advising. She was kind enough to help me get my husband in for testing and the dementia journey began in earnest. I can honestly say it was the toughest journey of my life.

I lost my husband ten years after that first fire. The path through dementia was painful as I watched my husband, who I had been with for 43 years at the time of his death, deteriorate and become a shadow of the man he once had been. Along the way, I lost a piece of him every day. In many ways, I felt relief when he died, but the pain on this side hasn’t been a picnic either.

Whether you are on the side of dementia or the side of death, the path is dreadful. It is my hope, with this blog, to help those who are traversing that path find strength for the journey. I want to help them discover the clues I didn’t readily see.