An Alzheimer Odyssey: Journey’s End

An absolutely beautiful essay by a recent widower who lost his wife of 40 years to Alzheimer's last month. More powerful than I can express.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Mussomeli

You hear over and over again how people wish they had just seen the person they love one more time, or done this or that for her before she died. But I had that for nearly a decade. I knew Sharon was dying, and I tried to make the most of it.

On September 18, 2022 Sharon left my earthly care for the sweeter embrace of heaven. It has now been a full month since her dying, but I have not yet come to grips with her being gone, although I am grateful that her horrific suffering is at an end. I have been chronicling our Alzheimer’s journey, both in prose and poetry, for over four years now in The Imaginative Conservative. This final eighth writing is the hardest, knowing she is truly now gone.

I was in Slovenia when I received a call from the hospice nurse at 2 AM on September 18. I dressed quickly and hurried to the airport, and was able to get on a flight home by 7 AM. But three hours before I landed, Sharon passed away. It is far too soon to even consider a time when I might stop cursing myself for not being with her in her last hours.

I sit here at my computer, and my hands are trembling; I find it hard to breathe. I’ve known for over a decade this day would come, but I can’t yet imagine a world without Sharon. Her death has overwhelmed my heart and broken my spirit. I am wrapped in an unbreakable web of regrets. I can think of nothing good I did for her for 40 years without effort and nothing bad she ever did without even greater exertion. And I tire of all the praise, all the comforting words. When so many people tell you what a wonderful husband you are, you grudgingly accept that they can’t all be lying. But you never quite shake the suspicion that they all are fools.

I take from my wallet a scrap of paper on which Sharon had scribbled a poem. It’s dated Thursday, November 12, 2015, a time when her dementia was becoming too apparent to ignore. One line I read over and over again: “Overwhelmed by the beauty and promise. I am full. Thank you, Lord.”

The burial was October 15 at Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, Virginia, a monastery of the Cistercian Order. Sharon’s ashes are buried on a gently sloping hilltop, along the tree line, near a pasture, looking onto the distant mountains. October was her favorite month, autumn her favorite season, mountain and forest her favorite venue, and sacred places for quiet prayer her favorite sanctuary. This coming spring I will return to plant dogwood trees, her favorite.

I have always disliked eulogies. I sometimes suspect they are the ultimate cancel culture. The real person drowns and disappears in an insipid sugary mix. Sharon deserved better than fluff and foam.

The Eulogy

Shortly after I began dating Sharon, I got a terrible sore throat. And as we all know, the only effective cure for a sore throat is to chew on raw garlic. So I was chewing on a clove of garlic one day when Sharon suddenly grabbed and kissed me. She did it so quickly that I didn’t have time to warn her that I was chewing garlic. I wanted to warn her because I had grudgingly accepted the sad truth that no matter how much women profess that they love you, they inevitably gag and turn away if you try to kiss them with garlic breath. But the thing about Sharon was that she didn’t gag at all. She didn’t even pull away. She just kept kissing me. This very prim, very prissy, very proper, young woman of 23 didn’t seem to care at all how gross my breath was. And I could feel myself literally, physically, falling for her.

Then a few weeks later, we were finally realizing that we would soon need to leave each other, Sharon for Ethiopia, me for Egypt. We were both so sad that I suggested we take a long walk to cheer ourselves up. So just as the sun was setting one evening, we walked across Key Bridge, and to make the walk even nicer, I took out my old edition of some Edna St. Vincent Millay poems and started reading to her as we walked along. One poem particularly was called Interim. She seemed to be enjoying it, but then I got to the verse, “I had you and I have you now no more.” I glanced at her and tears were silently streaming down her face. As we continued our walk, she clung more tightly to my arm and my heart melted even more.

And then there is the subject of children. One of our first dates was babysitting for the infant son of our Foreign Service friends, Mary and Dick Norland. A very cheap and weird date, but I think it was Sharon’s favorite date ever. And then just before we left for foreign lands, two of my nephews came to visit, and Sharon just adored them—and believe me my nephews are the furthest thing from adorable. It was incomprehensible that she adored them, and I became completely enthralled with her. Garlic, poetry, children. What else was there to do but spend my life with her?

My wife was brilliant. She was beautiful. She was extraordinarily kind and generous. Whether it was the destitute children of Manila, or the trafficked women of Cambodia, or the Roma/gypsies in Slovenia, Sharon always sided with those in need and took care of them. Sharon was the most loving person I ever knew, but it’s not just her kindness—or brilliance—that defines her. In our whole life together, we only got angry with each one or two, or at most three, million times. So it’s not too surprising that we sometimes found each other irksome. Yet many of those traits that I found most irritating, ironically, I now miss the most.

Sharon was without pretense. One of the first things that attracted me to her was her bizarre inability to flirt. At all. She simply always was who she was. I had never met such a woman. There are women, as the old cliché goes, who light up any room they enter. That wasn’t our Sharon. If she were in a good mood, she could set a room on fire with her glow. But if she was in a bad mood, you knew it. I have visited caves that felt less gloomy than a room where she was unhappy. For a long time, I saw this as a character flaw, but over the decades I came to see it as wonderful because you never had to wonder what Sharon was thinking or feeling. You always knew where you stood with her. In this world of so much contrived affection and fabricated happiness, Sharon was something refreshingly rare and genuine.

One Christmas—we still laugh about it—one of the gifts I gave her was a DVD of what I thought was one of her favorite movies. She unwrapped it, looked at me incredulously, and said “I hate this movie!” On Christmas morning. Who does that? So infuriating. And so reassuring. Because when she said she loved you or that she was proud of you or that she would never leave you, you knew it wasn’t just words.

She could also be critical of people. Sometimes she could be very tough, but never as tough as she was on herself. She rarely felt she was good enough, even though she far exceeded everyone else in almost every category of life. She tried damn hard to be perfect—and she nearly was. The most interesting thing about this trait was that while she could criticize and complain about most anything, she never could be cruel. She never could neglect anyone—even those who didn’t like her. Unlike most of us, she never experienced schadenfreude. And if she did criticize you, it didn’t mean she didn’t like you. In fact, there was something of a direct correlation between how much she criticized someone and how much she loved them. So not surprisingly, those she loved the most, her family especially, came under greater criticism. But her love, her devotion, her sacrifice for family were endless and ungrudging.

And at the same time, she was ferocious in defending those she loved. Even me. I remember once, after giving a speech in the Philippines, a Texas politician in the audience came up to me angrily because she felt my speech had been unpatriotic. I just started to laugh, but Sharon flew into a rage, and I literally had to restrain her. Her outburst caused me some trouble later, but it was well worth it. Such violent expressions of devotion are rare among diplomats. I was never more proud; I never felt more loved.

Sharon also had a strong sense of right and wrong. Another of our favorite family stories is about when we visited the Sistine Chapel, and a woman in the crowd started taking flash photography. Everyone around the woman was upset, but only Sharon spoke up and told her to stop. The woman, pretending not to understand English, responded in French. Without skipping a beat, Sharon started to scold the woman in fluent, violent French. It was wonderful to behold. I used to tell her that it is of no use to wage war against every injustice, and it is foolish to never be satisfied with how things are. We should just accept life as it is and enjoy it. To which she would reply that being dissatisfied is the engine of progress, and that if people like me ran the world we would still be living in caves and scavenging for food. And, of course, she was right.

If there remains one thing about Sharon I never could quite understand—and it is a terrible flaw all three of her children and her grandson share—it is her irrational affection for dogs. Dogs were an emotional sanctuary for her. They always calmed her and made her feel better. Perhaps because they are such ridiculous creatures, she rarely yelled at them and never criticized them.

Then the last time I visited Sharon was the Tuesday before she passed away. I stopped by for an hour to help her eat some brownies I had baked. She could barely walk at that point, but as ever, she was determined to get up. I took her in my arms and gently lifted her from the wheelchair. She stumbled forward into me and hugged me. Then, she patted my back. Weak though she was, her patting of my back was strong and firm. As if she were trying to console me. She had never done that before, not even once in our 42 years together. And it was only later, as I was driving away in my car, I realized that she hadn’t been patting me at all. It wasn’t patting; it was petting. And I laughed to realize that after more than 40 years of trying, I had finally gained canine status. I had always teased her that if reincarnation were a real thing, I would want to come back as her dog in my next lifetime. I’m glad I don’t have to do that now.

We love people for who they are; we love people despite who they are. We may like some things about them and dislike other things, but we love them in the entirety. This last year was a horrible time for Sharon after I placed her in a nursing home. But those years before she went into the nursing home, despite being fraught with fear and sorrow, were the very best years of our life. We enjoyed every day together: we never fought, we barely quarreled, we savored each walk and every car ride, we said thank you to each other more in those years than in the previous three decades, we said please even more often and we held hands and kissed every day, all day. I could finally make her laugh and I finally made her happy.

But those years weren’t enough. You hear over and over again how people wish they had just seen the person they love one more time, or done this or that for her before she died. But I had that for nearly a decade. I knew she was dying, and I tried to make the most of it. But ever since she died that same feeling is still there: that same regret, that same wish that I just need one more day, one more chance to tell her I love her, one more chance to kiss her, to thank her, to say good bye to her. I don’t think it is ever enough; there is never enough time.

And I don’t want ever to stop missing her; I don’t want ever to be so happy that I would ever forget missing her. Not missing her would leave me empty. I know I must move on, but I don’t ever have to let go. And every day now, many times each day, I’m left alone with those words of that Edna St. Vincent Millay poem: “I had you and I have you now no more.”

Images courtesy of the author.