She’s Lost in Our Home

This morning, Gail looked at me across the kitchen table and said, “I don’t know who these people are that are staying here.”

I glanced around. It was just the two of us. Just us, like it’s been for decades. But in her world—the one vascular dementia keeps rewriting in sudden, cruel drops—there were strangers in our house.

Vascular dementia doesn’t fade gradually like some other forms. It falls in steps. One day she’s mostly herself, and then—without warning—the floor drops out. Another piece of her gone. This latest step has been the hardest yet. More severe memory loss. Anxiety that won’t let her settle. A disoriented feeling that follows her from room to room.

I’ve tried everything I know. I’ve tried to get in her world instead of pulling her into mine. I’ve sat with her. I’ve just been with her, no agenda, no corrections, no desperate attempts to remind her of what used to be. But this time, something shifted.

For the first time ever, she admitted she doesn’t always know who I am.

She didn’t say it with fear. She said it matter-of-factly, the way you’d mention forgetting where you put your keys. But it landed differently for me. It landed like truth often does—quietly, and all at once.

The woman I’ve loved, the woman I’ve built a life with, is lost. Not lost out in the world somewhere. Lost here. Lost in our home. Lost in the rooms we painted together, at the table where we’ve shared so many  meals, in the bed we’ve slept in side by side.

I suppose this is what the experts mean when they talk about “progressive decline.” But experts don’t tell you what it feels like to be the stranger in your own marriage. They don’t prepare you for the moment when the person you love most looks at you with kind confusion, like you’re a guest she’s trying to be polite to.

I’m still here. I’m still sitting with her. I’m still trying to be the steady thing in a world that keeps shifting under her feet. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hurt. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t grieving for the woman who knew my name, who knew our story, who knew that this house—our home—belongs to us.

She’s lost. And some days, so am I.

But I’m not leaving. I’m staying right here, in this house full of strangers she can’t see and a husband she can’t always remember. Because love isn’t just what you feel when someone knows your name.

Love is what you do when they’ve forgotten it.

– Gregg