I might occasionally post these here, though I think I'll mostly put them on my writing blog. So here's today's effort, just to prove I did it:
----------------
They were sitting at a table near me. Both of his hands, wrinkled
and arthritic, clasped her tiny hand in his. He looked into her face with great
interest as she prattled on, not making a lick of sense to anyone but him. Her
words made him laugh, and I watched his face transform. I saw an indescribable something
in his face, perhaps a glimpse of the man that he once was, before age bent and
twisted his tall frame.
He looked at me, still fully engaged in his joy. The tenderness I saw there, and his obvious
devotion to his wife touched my heart deeply. Sitting alone at my table, I felt
a sudden stab of jealousy. Kind of silly, isn’t it, to be jealous of a couple
nearly 40 years older than me? Yet the stark contrast of this man with his
nurturing demeanor, still so obviously in love with his wife despite what
seemed to my experienced eye to be advancing dementia, with the bleakness of my
table, devoid of any interaction, pained me to my core.
I smiled back and watched as his wife let go of his hands
and dug into her pancakes.
“She loves her pancakes on Tuesdays,” he said, still
grinning.
“But it’s Wednesday,” I said.
“Not to her,” he said with a wink. “I figure, as long as she
enjoys coming here with me, and as long as she still eats like that, we’re just
gonna keep on coming.” He looked pensive for a moment, but then his smile came
back. “People say she’s not there anymore, but coming here – well, it
definitely proves that’s still her.”
“It looks like you two are very happy, and I guess that’s
all that matters in the end.”
“Lots of days are hard. Really hard. But that’s what I
signed up for, isn’t it? Always and forever, I’ll be her husband and her
protector.” He drank some of his ice water in big, noisy gulps. “She looked
after me every day of her life, until this disease started messing with her. My
turn!”
Once again, I had that pain in my chest as I momentarily contemplated
my pending senior years. I pushed the thought of forty or more years of
loneliness out of my mind as I questioned, “Did your wife work when she was
younger?”
The smile was back in full force. “Yeah! You know, she was a
legal secretary for years before our children were born. After they were born,
she couldn’t bear to go back to work, and so we made do. She decided to do free
lance writing for the local newspaper, so she could stay at home, you know? Did
quite well. Only retired from that about three years before the Alzheimer’s
took hold.”
“Wow! And what about you…what did you do?”
He suddenly became wistful. “I was a teacher at the medical
school where we lived.” He looked down at his hands. “Used to really enjoy
teaching. I miss it sometimes. But this is more important…and besides, I was
getting so old that the young docs were taking bets on how much longer it would
be before I dropped dead in class.” He winked and smiled again. “Thought about
pretending to drop dead on the last day of teaching, just to mess with them. I
chickened out.”
No comments:
Post a Comment