When We Were Who We Were

Scattershot insights and lightning bolts startle my thinking about living with Jim as he is overcome, increasingly occupied, by dementia.  It touches almost every notion you might entertain about communicating with your beloved.

Confabulation builds upon even falser confabulation and, soon enough, we are playing chess with the Queen of Hearts; dodging encounters with asshole ignorant physicians (according to Jim who ridicules medicos with a concatenation of jumbled noxious notions); castigating she who keeps us together in heart, mind and health (she would be me), fending off gratuitous hostility and grumptious anger. All of which makes some bit of sense for Jim but leaches me of energy, compassion and willingness to be good. And leaves me frustrated, angry, resentful and so devastatingly sad that there is no surcease from abject sorrow, no anodyne, not even hope.

Hard enough to live with this new, degraded version of Jim. Harder still to live outside the pale, to live with the loss of my beloved -- his calm brilliance, analytical genius, his shy adoration, his deep passion, high regard, bursting pride in us and in me, his beautiful humor, our intimately shared laughs, our knowledge of the other's body, our reverence of a shared consciousness. I miss my beloved with the ache that recalls the unique full union of who we were together in all ways. 

We were, when we were, so finest kind, so entwined, braided in love, adoration, hold-fastness, sweet comfort, and utterly to home.

But, now, now, we are mostly sundered and left bereft one of the other. And I could just die.