To begin with

            I began identifying with Dante’s entrance to The Inferno in 2011 when I walked away from a 25 year friendship and into a depressive tangled darkness.  Then, after several years of intensive therapy during which the path became straightforward once again, this dark wood returned in the form of my partner’s dementia.

            This blog will be a non-linear set of thoughts about my experience.  I foresee it as a journal about books, daily life, discouragements, encouragements, and everything I’ve dealt with on this journey.  I write “I” because I will not speak for my spouse, even though I have done so throughout our many years together – though that isn’t my thought for today.

            I am a member of a private Facebook group for folks who care for their spouses with dementia.  I will not be repeating anything said in that group unless I have permission but I will report on common issues. 

            One returning question is, “When did it start?” or “When did you first notice?” 

            I usually reply, “When we got audited by the IRS nine years ago.”  This is because he always did the taxes just perfectly without a problem and then he made a giant mistake.  During a two hour phone call with an IRS agent who refused to travel from Portland to Central Oregon to meet with us in person, my spouse started speaking with a Southern accent.  Later, when I told this story to a colleague who taught brain science, she asked me, “Do you think he had a stroke?”

            Now that I know more about dementia, I actually think the TIAs began back in 2005.  That’s when I noticed him “filling in” stories he’d lifted from the newspapers, adding material that wasn’t there.  At the time I just considered it one of his peculiarities.  I actually thought he was “lying.”  The therapist I had at the time discouraged me from worrying about or being annoyed by the behavior.  “If he isn’t hurting anyone by it, let it go.”  She said nothing about a possibly failing brain.

            After the IRS debacle he started having other troubles.  He stopped working out my “monthly debt.”  He was in charge of monies in the house that included not only taxes but also paying bills and grocery shopping.  He would then bill me, month by month, for my half of the expenses.  That stopped around 2011 when he also missed a couple of payments on bills and I put almost everything on auto-pay. 

            But it wasn’t until the therapist who was helping me through my emotional crash looked at pictures from my 60^th Birthday party that I actually thought the changes were dementia.  My therapist looked at a picture of my spouse and myself and said, “That’s the thousand yard stare.”

            And that’s when my massive project of late-life adulting began!