Mid night thoughts May 7th

It’s a pernicious disease that has outsmarted us both, and Burt and I are pretty smart. Lewy Body Dementia has made its wily way into our lives. I have been split into fragmented personalities some of them adored some abhorred others tolerated.

Burt is never fully alone except when he dreams I have abandoned him. He has the half dozen or more wives problem to resolve, but nothing is ever resolved.

Solutions, and lord knows he works at those with painstaking precision, elude him. Just when he comes to a conclusion, he decides to hold on to that other wife. The crazy one.

He doesn’t mind all the people peopling his world, but it confuses him. He’s confounded when he realizes mom and daddy are dead, but they still will come to work on weekends when he doesn’t have an aide.

The confusion over who I am can be frightening, too. When it is, we need the intervention of a trusted doorman or our neighbors. His brain and his actions are affected by all these disturbances.

The distortions of memory, of mood, change his realities so that he and I live in an unreality. No logic can rewrite the scenarios as they unfold. It is a Kafkaeasque fiction, a nightmarish Ionesco play.

We live in the genre of movie I always most avoided, the horror film. I face him as his sweet wife and turn to return as the nasty one or disappear altogether til I reappear as my more welcome self. It’s hard. On both of us.