JOAN’S BLOG – FRIDAY, AUGUST 5, 2011 – A DIFFERENT TYPE OF LONELINESS

We Alzheimer spouses live with a husband or wife whose personality, cognition, abilities, actions, reactions, and memories, are so altered by Alzheimer’s Disease that we often feel we are living with a stranger. We live with loneliness, because it is no longer possible to relate to our spouses as a lover, partner, friend – SPOUSE. They are living with us, yet we are alone.

Because of the loneliness I often feel NOW, while my husband is alive, I have written blogs stating that I feel I will be okay when I am truly alone, when Alzheimer’s Disease has terminated his life. I will forge a new life from the ashes of Alzheimer’s Disease. I will have girl friends with whom to travel and enjoy activities. Maybe I will even find a male “friend with benefits”.  I have always been able to keep busy by myself with books, and creative activities. I will miss the husband and life I had, but I will be okay.

That is what I thought, and that is what I believed when I wrote those blogs. Now I am not so sure.

For the first 6 weeks after my shoulder surgery, I slept sitting up in bed, with my right arm tightly bound in a heavy sling, pointing left, fastened by Velcro from neck to fingers. Sid has slept to the right of me for our 41 years together. Sometimes cuddling, sometimes spooning, sometimes with our hands touching across the body of a huge Golden Retriever between us. But always touching. Suddenly we were unable to touch at all. How surprised I was to feel a different type of loneliness than I had been feeling from his Alzheimer changes. It was as if there was an ocean between us. I missed the contact, the warmth and comfort of his body. I missed him.

I started to think – what will it be like when he is gone; no longer by my side in bed; never to feel or touch him again. I now had far less confidence in my “I will be all right” blogs. The loneliness of being an Alzheimer widow with a living spouse started to pale in comparison to being a true widow. I could not imagine the finality of never seeing or holding my husband again.

This has apparently been praying upon my subconscious, as well as conscious mind, as I have been experiencing a recurring dream for the past few months. Not every night, but at least once a week.  It is not always the same scenario, but there is one constant – I am out of the house, away somewhere, and I cannot get in touch with Sid at home. No matter which button I press or which icon I touch on my Smartphone, it will not work. Different screens and pictures come up, but never the dialup screen or my contacts list. I cannot call him; I do not know where he is, or if he is all right, and I am frantic. I wake up sweating, looking to my right, assuring myself that he is still with me.

He sleeps beside me, not as he was for the first 35 years I knew and loved him, but still in the body of the man I have loved and been one with for 4 decades. When I close my eyes and we kiss, it feels the same as it did when I first kissed him, 42 years ago, and I imagine him to be the man he was then and the next 3 ½ decades.  With his arms embracing me and his lips kissing mine, we are the same as we always were. It is us floating back in time for a few precious minutes. What will I do when he is no longer here – that will be loneliness as I have never known.  

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The Alzheimer Spouse LLC
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