What Are Friends For?

To Make It Through a Pandemic

“I’ve got to keep breathing because tomorrow the sun will rise, and who knows what the tide will bring.” — Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) to Wilson (soccer ball) in Castaway.

Nothing prepared me for that moment in early 2020 when my wife of 32 years entered Assisted Living after 10 years of decline from Alzheimer’s Disease.

I had retired at the age of 66 to become her care-giver. Exhaustion and stress crept into my life as the disease progressed. I treasured those moments of “lucidity” in the morning when there would be brief but meaningful conversations.

To members of my monthly support group who were traveling on similar paths this was always inexplicable. We knew the science. The brain has a 100 billion cells and never stops trying to find a path to process thought and produce a moment of normalcy, only to have you turn your head and quickly see it disappear, returning you to the world of memory loss and cognitive decline.

Still, I could crawl into bed every night and give my wife a hug and know that she felt comforted and would return that pat-pat-pat on my shoulder so that I too would feel comforted.

And, then, there was a fall when she hit the back of her head and was suddenly swept away into a world of delirium, immobility, and further dependency. She would find her way back to what professionals call a new “baseline” — a place of living that required more support day and night than I could…