Vodka Yonic features a rotating cast of women and nonbinary writers from around the world sharing stories that are alternately humorous, sobering, intellectual, erotic, religious or painfully personal. You never know what you’ll find in this column, but we hope this potent mix of stories encourages conversation.
In some post-tornado photos, an entire neighborhood is reduced to rubble, yet a single tricycle in a backyard invites a child to play; or the whole roof has blown off a house, but the table is still set for dinner; or an intact Bible is flipped open to a favorite verse. I thought about this recently as I glanced out the window and saw my husband working on his lawn mower.
My husband has Alzheimer’s. It’s been getting progressively worse for almost five years. He often can’t recall his children’s and grandchildren’s names, yet he can take apart and repair just about anything. He can’t read the menu at a restaurant or hum his favorite song, yet he’s an ace navigator when we travel. He has some memories of his childhood and knows that he eats a dish of ice cream every night promptly at 8 p.m. Sometimes I’ll mention a trip we took or a joke we’ve shared, and his face will light up like it did in the old days.
He’s not able to read, but he still has a quiet time every morning, praying for people he doesn’t remember, touching their names one by one on the file cards he has always used as his prayer list, names that now don’t have faces.
Sometimes I’ll provide a convoluted explanation describing how he knows someone, where they live, who their children or parents are, where they work. I show him photos from Facebook — I never know what piece of minutia is going to trigger his memory. Once he gets started thinking about someone or something, he can’t let it go until he understands. More often than not, this takes a very long time. I sometimes get so frustrated I want to scream.
I can see his anxiety and embarrassment when we run into someone he’s supposed to know. “My brain doesn’t work anymore,” he says, so they won’t walk away with hurt feelings when he doesn’t remember them.
He was a child-and-family therapist. He occasionally taught at the local college and mentored several young people. We recently had lunch with one of them, a young woman he worked with for five or six years. He was anxious about seeing her again because, try as he might, he just couldn’t get her in his mind. Even seeing her in person and chatting did nothing to produce a memory. He was visibly disturbed and sad.
But she was gracious and generous. “You might not remember me, but I’ll always remember you!” she said, smiling. “I learned so much from you.”
And it’s at this moment I remembered why I married him.
I often think about all the years he took care of me — bringing dinner on a tray when I was studying for a big exam, taking over the grocery shopping and meal preparation when I took a dream job with an hours-long daily commute, driving straight through from East Tennessee to upstate New York while I napped in the passenger seat. Holding me when my stepdad died.
I get weepy and more than a little angry when I recall the fun we had camping in our little pop-up, or our silly restaurant game of trying to decide what other diners did for a living, or how we made songs out of signs and sights along the road as we drove. We laughed about everything and nothing. We were crazy kids for 25 years.
Then the tornado blew through.
Sometimes, being a caregiver is mind-numbing and dreary. It’s hard to remember how lucky you are when you’re grieving someone who’s still alive. But it’s those cheerful moments of lucidity that remind me of who we were. They’re like the tricycle in the yard, inviting me to jump on.
Then, like a ghost, it’s gone.
