Bill suggested that maybe it was time for the two of them to go upstairs to bed. That seemed a good idea to Rita.
An hour later, as I was washing some dishes, Rita wandered in followed by Bill, his face a shape I’d never seen before, making him look ten years older. As he spoke I realized his false teeth were out. His lips and cheeks flapped around vowels and consonants as he said, “Is there something you can do? She won’t let me sleep. She keeps talking to me.”
The only thing I could think to say was, “Rita, would you like to sit with me in the sunroom for a while?”
“Oh sure,” she said.
The sunroom, home to many plants of Rita the gifted gardener, was where she and Bill did most of their reading. Invariably, the day’s Globe and a stack of books sat on a coffee table between two comfortable chairs. Across the room, their television.
Bill went back to bed and Rita and I watched Masterpiece Theater. The story was about a village priest in World War II France helping his town deal with Nazi occupation. One thread of the story was a young boy. Defying a prohibition, at any hour of the day or night, he broadcast for all to hear on a wind-up record player patriotic French music. The Nazis eventually captured him and executed him. As the boy stood before the firing squad, Rita, who had been completely silent throughout the program, said, “That’s just what it’s like for me.”
A month later, I accompanied Bill to visit Rita in her Alzheimer’s residence. This would be only the second time since Rita left their home that Bill felt able to see her. It tormented him to have no answer to Rita’s pleas. “Oh Bill,” she said that day, “we have only a short time left, and I want to spend it with my head on your chest. You are my love, my dearest friend. It makes no sense that we are not home together, caring for one another. When it’s time, I want to go-‘Bing!’-to heaven with you. Let’s go home, please.”
Two weeks after that, Bill, my wife, plus one of our dearest friends and I visited Rita. Rita’s home was a fourth-floor wing that included a solarium that looked out over the tops of oaks at a Boston neighborhood skyline. She told us she sometimes came to this room and tried to smash a window so that she could climb out and fly home. The Big Home, heaven, she meant. Gritting her teeth and swinging the side of her fist toward the glass, she said, “I go just like this.”
“Now Rita, don’t say that,” Bill said.
“But I do,” Rita said. “This is no place for me.” She then stood up and walked over to Bill and began caressing the top of his head with her hand, looking him in the eye and smiling as if to say, “There, there, my Bill, you just don’t understand.”
While Alzheimer’s was the equivalent of a firing squad for Rita, she was much more than a victim up against a wall waiting to die. The day after she and I watched Masterpiece Theater, Rita accompanied me on an errand by car. Mostly we just drove around. The subject of Jesus came up. Rita said, “I pray to Jesus every day to take me to heaven.” She paused. “But so long as he chooses to leave me here I am going to enjoy myself.”
A monk of my acquaintance has said that the most courageous prayer he knows is: “Lord, change no circumstance in my life; change me.” Similarly, I know of no greater form of self-love than the commitment to enjoy ourselves. Its greatness lies in the fact that it is explosive.
The 19th-century Hindu swami, Sri Yukteswar, said, “The power of unfulfilled desires is the root of all of man’s slavery.” To truly enjoy our self, then, requires that we surrender our attachment to every single desire.
Alzheimer’s, in my view, is a sacred gift to the human family to those who live and die with it; to those who know and love them; and to those of us aware that the disease eventually may consume us-because Alzheimer’s demands that either we broaden our perception of what it means to be human, or live in the misery of unfulfilled desire. I wonder if Rita lived so long with Alzheimer’s because it had so much to teach her, and she, ever the student, ever the lover of Jesus, was willing, despite waves of despair, to stay alive long enough to learn all she could.
I met Rita on her 62nd birthday, 31 years ago. I was not ideal son-in-law material for a woman who had spent much of her life mentoring choir boys. I wore a beard, an earring and carried a purse. I’d been married and had fathered a son, then 13. It helped that my alma mater was Amherst (i.e., I was certifiably smart)-but not much.
My wife says that her parents didn’t readily welcome any of their children’s partners. Over the years, what created a bridge for Rita and Bill as it pertained to me was that their daughter and I were obviously in love, my life story revealed a hunger for learning, and I respected them.
Among the lessons I’ve learned only in hindsight is that nobody can have too many healthy parents or children for that matter. What favor, then, that the universe was offering me a set of parents in their sixties and to them a son in his thirties!
