Little Happinesses Again

Lucas Favre on Unsplash

Yesterday he filled out and cashed a check for "cash" at the bank!  I felt so happy that he was able to do that!

We were out shopping for his Christmas present to me.  I had suggested earlier in the day that we would go shopping for my Christmas present he had checked for a credit card in his wallet.  I've cut up all but one of his credit cards and was worried that he would be upset but he wasn't.  He found the one card.  Later, before we actually went out (after he had a nap) he searched for his checkbook.  He couldn't find it but I found the stack of checkbooks and he took a new one out with us. 

When we got to Silverado I went right to the little box of nice, inexpensive studs and found some sparklies that I know I'll like.  I didn't want him to try and write a check there in the store because the gal might have gotten impatient with him and I hadn't brought my "dementia cards" with me.  So I gave him the $24 they cost and told him to have them gift wrap.  Then I walked around to look at other jewelry while keeping an eye on him.

And YAY -- he did it!  He paid the money and asked for the earrings to be gift wrapped.  At one point he got his wallet out and started looking at cards (having forgotten, I suppose, that he gave them cash) and I walked up close to the counter to monitor any errors.  But the clerk got the earrings into a box and into a bag.  Then we went to the bank where he filled out a check and got $70.  Why 70?  I don't know.  He doesn't have a sense of how much things cost anymore.  But I was so excited to see him do this old behavior.

Little Happinesses

Will, 1997

Just as there are little sadnesses, there are small happinesses as well.  These occur when he does something that I'd imagined he was no longer able to do.  We had one of those on Saturday night!  I was so happy.  I'd selected a documentary about Studio 54 for us to watch.  It was from Zeitgeist Films.  Will saw the word "Zeitgeist" on the screen and then he said, "Zeitgeist, Spirit of the Times."  I thought, at the time, that he was remembering the definition of Zeitgeist. 

Well, this morning I discovered that he was reading the definition off the screen.  That just burst my bubble and changed what I am writing about.

There have been other moments in which he remembers something I think he's forgotten.  And sometimes he seems so proud that he remembers -- his face lights up as he offers his memory like a little boy giving the correct answer to a teacher's question.

Yesterday one of the members of the church I joined last year talked to me about Will's approaching death and about how it would be hard for me and that she was there for me if I needed support and that I was loved.  I do my best to try and "rest" in God ("my yoke is easy and my burden is light") but that rest doesn't spare me the daily grief.

I wonder how long I'll grieve if I do survive this marriage.

Seeing Eye to Eye

Will and I can now see eye to eye on his eyes.

Rhcastilhos. And Jmarchn at wiki commons

On Monday morning we went to see the second ophthalmologist at Orion Eye Center, Dr. Laith Kadasi, a very handsome young fellow who worked kindly with Will, in spite of Will's occasional lapses in understanding. We saw him after the assistant had already done a bunch of views, including taking pictures.  The female assistant had trouble getting Will to put his head in the cup and against the headrest -- no matter where she put it he kept moving around and complaining about the bad design.

This is an aspect of his personality that is still recognizably Will -- his assumption that if things aren't working "correctly" that the world outside of him is at fault -- not him.  This is one way that he is like some members of my family of origin -- blaming rather than being accountable.  It's also a part of who he is that has had negative impact on me over the years because I am the opposite.  

Through most of my life my mind has struggled with a negative narcissism -- believing myself responsible for many of the bad things that happen outside of me, especially the sadness or anger of other people.  When I was a child in sixth grade I believed that all the tension I felt in our home was due to me and that if I died everyone would be happier so I started praying to die. I used to feel desperate when my Mom was sad and terrified when she was angry.  After my oldest sister's "explosion" into madness when I was in high school, I divorced myself from my family in my head and fled.  I fell in love with Will just nine months after our family's entrance into the tragic. And shortly after I fell in love I started responding to his facial expressions the same way I did to my Moms -- becoming scared when he looked angry, becoming desperate and unhappy when he was sad.

It took me decades to figure out that Will's emotions belonged to him and mine belonged to me.

But I am still highly reactive to his anger and sorrow.  And he was quite angry when he was at Orion on Monday.  He kept insisting on "NO SURGERY!"  

Fortunately, after the examination, the doctor agreed.  Not because the surgery would not be warranted were Will a younger man. The doc made sure I understood that so I wouldn't be going around telling people the wrong thing.

The retina in Will's right eye is indeed torn, but it was torn so long ago that there's a lot of scar tissue around it.  That makes the surgery so complicated it would have to be done in Portland at OHSU.  Well, the complicated nature of the surgery combined with Will's age and obvious disinclination to have surgery resulted in a recommendation of "watch and wait:"  keeping watch on the left eye so he doesn't lose sight in that one and keeping aware of any pain that could result from the shrinking or changed in the right eye.  He still has just a tiny bit of sight in that eye -- but just at the bottom.

Toward the end of the exam Will started talking about "Dr. Timm's mother" as being better than anyone.  I held his arm and said something to stop him from going off on that story -- maybe I said, "They don't know Dr. Tim," and I said something to the assistant, maybe "this is one of his stories."  This story is a fantasy.  It is based on a visit he took to the dentist during which an "older woman" cleaned his teeth (a woman in her 40s maybe).  He created a story that she was our dentist's mother.  Then in the telling she became not cleaner but a doctor herself.  I think this is because his brain was conflating Dr. Timm with an old friend, Dr. Richard Howard whose wife may also have been a doctor and whose mother surely was, as she was the famous Dr. Minnie Howard.

He has long done this -- made up stories.  It was rarely a game that I could play with him because I was usually far too serious and I didn't understand the game, but he's had other people in his life that he could play with.  Sometimes he would do voices when he made up the stories, hence his strange use of a Southern accent with the IRS agent back in 2010.  

So I am now sad about Will's lack of complete sight in his right eye but relieved that I will not have to either talk him into an unwanted surgery OR feel guilty for not talking him into it.