Julie Macfie Sobol - Love and Forgetting: A Husband and Wifes Journey Through Dementia

Prologue

1959

Julie

I am in an upstairs room in Peters Hall, Oberlin College, Ohio, looking over Tappan Square. The class is Introspection and Observation: Philosophical Aspects of Psychoanalysis. A skinny, dark-haired boy whom I had seen around campus but never met came up to me after the bell rang. Was I headed for the library? he wanted to know. Yes, I was. Or I could be. We walked side-by-side to nearby Carnegie Library and ended up studying together all afternoon. Before we headed off to our dorms to get ready for dinner, I had agreed to a date the following Saturday.

That was the beginning of more than a beautiful friendship. On our first date, as we danced to a recording of Serenade in Blue in the rec centers darkened lounge, he recited a detailed history of the Six Tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy in my ear. This was a new, and endearing, approach to courtship. Id endured too many evenings with sweet but tongue-tied boys whose conversational skills were limited to asking if I liked my classes this year before sinking into awkward silence. How could I not be interested?

Ken was never at a loss for words back then. Historyany kind of historywas a favorite topic; Id learned that on our first date. But he had other things he wanted to talk aboutfor instance, how very different Europe was from Ohio. Ken had returned to the United States just days before the fall semester started and now, six months later, he was still full of stories about that year of discovery. We spent a lot of time talking in the librarys smoke-filled student lounge. After hed found matches and lit up our Salem cigarettesa ritual of the eraI would put down my textbook and listen to his tales of hitchhiking through Spain, debating politics sur les ponts de Paris , and taking in brilliant sociology lectures at the London School of Economics.

Eventually, when we left Europe behind and moved on to other subjects, I was surprised and pleased to find that Ken, like me, read a lot of poetry. He, in turn, was only mildly indignant when he found out that, in addition to being familiar with poets past and present, I knew a lot of poems by heart and could always come up with quotations in defense of my opinions. Though I enjoy listening to a good talker, I also like to talk.

Still, I was secretly pleased when he took to telling his friends in mock amazement, Can you believe it? Im dating a girl who knows more poetry than I do. Amazing. (That was how boys talked back in 1959. Its hard now for me to believe that we were only a couple of years away from Betty Friedan, bra burning, and Take-Back-the-Night marches.)

When did we first know we were becoming seriously involved? Maybe it was the spring weekend when Ken used some pretext to talk his mother into letting him borrow her car to drive us to New York. We spent two days exploring Manhattan and two nights sharing a single room in Hotel Edison.

Maybe we knew even earlier than that: the night Ken walked me back to the dorm after studying for mid-semester exams. That morning, one of the spring storms that every once in awhile blow inland from Lake Erie had covered the campus with a foot of snow and caused the temperature to plummet. The sidewalks were icy and treacherous, and suddenly my feet flew out from under me. I landed in a huge drift, my books and papers scattering all around. Ken immediately slipped too, and crashed down on top of me. We filled the icy night air with peals of laughter for no reason beyond the sheer enjoyment of the moment; only the bulky limestone buildings keeping us company, their sharp angles softened by the whiteness.

So many snowfalls since then, in so many different settings.

Part I

Leaving the Fields and Trees

Chapter 1

Julie

Spring, 2002optimistic tulips push their way up through the last grimy traces of winter. Some forty-three years after our first meeting, Ken and I were living deep in rural Ontario. Overall I prefer city life to the country (previous stops in our nomadic life together had included stays in New York, London, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Montreal, and Toronto), but Ive never regretted those years in the country: eight of them in a back-road log cabin halfway between the big cities of Montreal and Ottawa; then six years in a modern bungalow with a distant view of Lake Erie outside the kitchen window.

In both places, our involvement with local politics had led to some warm friendships (and some not so warm, but always interesting). Living in relative isolation had made us self-dependent and cognizant of ourselves as a parta very small partof the natural world. The nearby fields and woodlots, each with its own shape and microclimate, had become a familiar landscape in our shared world.

Buta big butlately my mind was turning more and more toward Toronto. I could tell that even Ken, who always claimed to be a country boy at heart despite a childhood spent in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, was starting to feel the pull of city life. We needed more people around us; it was as simple as that. I would miss the fields and trees, but as we pulled up stakes and pointed the car eastward, I knew we were saying good-bye to the country for good.

By early summer, we were resettled in Torontos Little Italy, with its crowded sidewalks, bicycles, outdoor cafes, and people galore. It was wonderful to be closer to our grandchildren and within a short walk of bookstores, museums, and even one of the few remaining neighborhood movie theaters. However, during one of our first expeditions out to see a play at Harbourfront, Ken became panicky. Well have to leave at the intermission, he whispered in the dark theater. Theres no chance of getting a taxi, and we shouldnt be walking around down here at this late hour.

Could he be serious? In danger at Queens Quay? That was ridiculous! When I pointed out that the theater was located on the top floor of a busy restaurant/shopping concourse, and that after the final act we were sure to find a whole fleet of cabs hungry for fares, he relented. But this was a guy who used to walk home through Brooklyns dark, deserted streets in the early morning hours without a second thought.

What on earth was going on?

During the last few years in the country, there had been hints of trouble: a sudden dislike of crowds, problems communicating over the phone, bouts of irritability that came and went like the weather. We blamed it all on ageing, on the children living (at that point) far away, on a couple of longtime friendships ending, on the many hours of work we were putting in on our second book collaboration, Lake Erie: A Pictorial History . But these were a natural part of life, which up to now I thought we had been weathering pretty well. The theater panic was harder to explain away.

Over the next year other behavioral quirks made their appearance. One night I was awakened out of a sound sleep by a whoosh of air. In the dim light from the hall, I could make out blankets being swirled above my head, one after the other, as Ken experimented with various combinations of bed coverings.