So poignantly expressed. I am usually skeptical of 'true love', but these kind of stories remind me I could be so utterly wrong. It is rare to find people as committed to each other as Judy & Steve.
So poignantly expressed. I am usually skeptical of 'true love', but these kind of stories remind me I could be so utterly wrong. It is rare to find people as committed to each other as Judy & Steve.
Wise, thanks. That very concisely captures what I've been coming around to understanding about having relationships with anyone. I've had it easy with best friends that were so similar (because we grew up together), but life is long(ish) and people change and grow apart. Even if you have a a relationship that is on easy-mode, it will change for a sufficiently long time-horizon (marriage).
When couples come to ministers to talk about their marriage ceremonies, ministers think it’s interesting to ask if they love one another. What a stupid question! How would they know? A Christian marriage isn’t about whether you’re in love. Christian marriage is giving you the practice of fidelity over a lifetime in which you can look back upon the marriage and call it love. It is a hard discipline over many years.
If she got really sick I would stay with her and care for her. A huge chunk of that is because I'm attached to her, the little human pattern that the universe mumbles out. The other mind that looks at me and convinces me I actually exist.
I personally think it's irresponsible to set up these weird transcendental expectations. If anyone reading this has yet to fall in love or be in a long term relationship, it's all flowery and cute and lovey at first and then one day you fart for the first time in front of her. There's like, non-subjectively evident demands that you agree to impose on yourself when becoming a union. Physical. Social. Emotional.
I would not leave my wife if her mind was gone. Besides my irrational human attachment, I can't imagine putting my family, her family, our friends, through the experience of seeing her be abandoned by her life partner. Of having them experience evil unmask itself through the act of relegating her to a meat body, which we all are.
I don't know why I felt such a strong urge to express my cynicism. I don't believe in souls, I guess is part of it. I also don't like when people get hyped into expecting the universe from others. My wife loves me deeply, I feel it when she randomly puts her head on my shoulder or I catch her staring at me. She would also yell at me in embarrassment if I farted loudly next to her at the grocery store.
I never thought of leaving or not caring for her, just as I am sure she would have never left me if I was in the same situation. Was this because of a deep love, a result of thirty years spent building a life and habits together, civic and marital duty or some combination of all of these? The thought of not caring for someone in her situation so close to me is anathema.
Concerning diseases that reduce ones mental acuity; every time she would lose the ability to speak or understand, it was crushing. She would often regain some functionality, but each time something was lost. In her final days, she would sometimes regain consciousness and speak to me, but couldn't understand what she was saying. This is/was one of the most distressing things for me to experience. I often sit and wonder what it was she wanted to tell me and how I will never know.
Before she stopped talking at all, she also had a period that she spook gibberish. I learned to just pretend to understand her, assuming that she meant something positive with her attempt to say something. I learned to read her face instead of her words.
In the last year her eyes would usually be dull and only now and then there would be a spark of light in her eyes that would not last longer than a second. I never wondered whether she still recognized me. I assumed that the concept of husband did not mean anything to her anymore. I am happy that I still recognized her till the end, because I know that some people with Alzheimer's Disease will change so much in their behavior that relatives do no longer recognize them.
We will never know what your wife wanted to say. Maybe the words that came out of her mouth were not even the words she wanted to say. Maybe you should take the fact that she attempted to talk to you as a sign that she was happy that you were with her at that moment.
Thank you for giving us your thoughts. I hope to live up to the standard you set with the clearly towering love you shared with your wife. I'm dumb, young, unwise so I'll dare to presume: I am certain she would have told you how important you are to her, how much she loves you and how thankful she was that you shared your life with her.
Sorry, I try not to be emotional. Especially on a forum like HN where rationality and clarity of thought seem to be the M.O. Its impossible to imagine what you've gone through and what you're going through. I send you a huge, digital, hairy man hug my dude.
Thanks for the hug. It is much appreciated.
I choose to believe that your wife wanted to tell you how much she loved you and what a wonderful life she had with you.
Hugs from me and the dogs
It is perhaps the gravitas and wordsmanship which makes the author's story remarkable. It exposed us to his thought process, and the minutaé of his feelings. As a thinking species, we perhaps appreciate this expressivity. These adversities are more common than depicted & many couples with disabilities do share meaningful time together.
I appreciate how we almost reflexively communicate about those emotions in bits of poetry. They splay out in so many directions, it's like we're picking fruits from an orchard and showing each other what we discover. It's really nice to get to be in the orchard.
Osho – The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha
From Wiki:
> Ultimately though, as an explicitly "self-parodying" guru, Rajneesh even deconstructed his own authority, declaring his teaching to be nothing more than a "game" or a joke.
Perhaps that's why, as an atheist, I find him so fascinating - he covers a lot of genuinely useful and interesting ground (meditation, philosophy) while never seeming to take it too seriously.
Marriages between college-educated people are only about 30% likely to end in divorce.