Cheryl and I toasted to our wedding in a hotel gazebo in Lahaina on May 12, 1998.
A tear slipped off my cheek and dripped on my lap just as my brother-in-law, Steve, walked past.
“Can I make you a cup of regular now?”
Sitting on his couch and already finished with a cup of decaf, I’d paused while reading “Still Alice,” a novel about a woman slipping into Alzheimer’s. The realistic story by Lisa Genova was made into a 2014 movie starring Julianne Moore. My wife, Cheryl, and I never watched it nor read the book.
I wondered if Steve noticed my tears; my sister, Karen, had yet to get up. “Yes please,” I replied.
As Steve brewed the coffee, I slipped downstairs into the finished basement, where I sleep when visiting their home in Minocqua, Wisconsin. I blew my nose and composed myself.
This was Saturday, the day before Mother’s Day. The day before my 67th birthday, and, yes, I was born on Mother’s Day. Had Cheryl not died this past Feb. 25, Sunday also would have been our 26th anniversary. Yes again—we got married on my birthday.
I wonder: Do you still “celebrate” an anniversary after one spouse dies?
Monday would bring another observance; Mom, who also lives in Minocqua, turned 92 that day.
What set me off while reading the book was the section in which Alice Howland, a professor at Harvard, learns she has Alzheimer’s. She made the appointment without her husband’s knowledge and at first denied the diagnosis.
Ten years ago when Cheryl was first diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment and probable Alzheimer’s to come, she, too, was in denial. That created much tension. Unlike the husband in “Still Alice,” I had forced Cheryl to see a neurologist, knowing her forgetfulness had become far from normal. I was in the room when those terrible results of testing came.
Despite Cheryl’s denials, I wonder how she really felt back then. That diagnosis stunned me even though it wasn’t really surprising. Was she likewise shocked? Was she frightened beyond anything I could imagine?
How did she cope, internally, at least, with her early struggles with memory? Did suicide cross her mind as it had Alice Howland’s?
I always thought most about my own feelings. How would I cope? How would I adjust my expectations? How soon would our wonderful life, one full of activities, decay?
Now, with the book forcing me to think more about Cheryl’s feelings, frustrations and fears, my tears flowed.
Also, despite Cheryl’s denials, Karen and a couple of Cheryl’s close friends told me she had confided in them that “I just can’t make my brain work like it used to.”
Sunday night, while Steve made lasagna, Mom and I sipped brandy old-fashioneds—Cheryl’s favorite drink. We toasted to her and posed for Mother’s Day photos—Mom and me, Mom and Karen, Mom and Karen and me.
I was all smiles by then. But more tears had come Sunday morning as I read not just texted birthday wishes but thoughtful words from some of our best friends, people who remembered that, yes, Cheryl and I got married on my birthday. We said our vows on the Hawaiian island of Maui, in the city of Lahaina, no less. Yes, the city where a firestorm destroyed more than 2,200 buildings and killed more than 100 people last August.
Though Cheryl’s fog of mind erased details of our wedding, I’ll never forget it. We had booked a four-island tour with a Baltimore company. We were engaged but had yet to set a wedding date. I suggested we get married during that vacation.
“Which island would you like to get married on?” Cheryl asked.
“Makes no difference to me; whichever you want.”
“I’d like to get married on Maui, but there’s one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“The only day we have a break from sightseeing there is your birthday. You don’t want to get married on your birthday, do you?”
“Well,” I responded, “if we do I’ll never forget our anniversary.”
Too bad Cheryl did.
As the years passed, it wasn’t like I didn’t see her debilitating confusion coming. I never thought she’d make it to our 25th anniversary. So, in 2018, I invited our closest relatives to join us for our 20th, and we dined and enjoyed the performance of “42nd Street” at the Fireside Theatre in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin.
It was a wonderful evening, but I’ll always remember our 25th anniversary more.
Last year, May 12 came on a Friday. I wasn’t about to try to get our close relatives—almost all living out of town—to Janesville for what had to be a limited celebration. Instead, I invited only our two closest couple friends. Don and Barb live in Janesville, the Wisconsin city where Cheryl lived her entire life. Don worked with us at the newspaper, where Cheryl and I met, and he had known Cheryl since 1967. Jim and Bernice live in the Milwaukee suburb of New Berlin but grew up with Cheryl, and she was the maid of honor at their wedding 50-some years ago.
We discussed ideas: Should we try to take Cheryl on a picnic? Should we try to take her to a restaurant? Or should we just celebrate at the Huntington Place memory care unit where she had resided since Feb. 1?
In the end, we all agreed to keep it simple. I took our framed wedding photos up so the staff could display them on a table. I bought a big sheet cake to share with Cheryl’s fellow residents—almost all women—and the staff. We took juice, too, but Cheryl wanted to enjoy one of the nonalcoholic beers that the staff provided.
I had asked the staff to get her dressed in something nice, but while we set up the cake and other party fixings in the large activity room, Bernice went to retrieve Cheryl from her bedroom. My wife came down the hall wearing a maroon Cave of the Mounds T-shirt.
I let it go when I saw Cheryl’s face. The party was on. In the first of 21 photos I still have on my cellphone of that gathering, Cheryl is standing beside a smiling Bernice and just took her hand away from her mouth as the celebration so surprised her. She appears to be near tears with joy.
Of course, until that moment, she had no idea it was our 25th anniversary.
In another photo, she’s standing between Bernice and me and the cellphone captured a little dance-like shake of Cheryl’s head as she’s smiling broadly. In a photo of Cheryl and me behind the cake, she’s leaning away in humor as I lean in for a kiss. In the next one she’s laughing, and in the third in that series, she’s dancing a little jig. In every photo, you can tell Cheryl was having a great time. One has her pointing at someone out of the picture, her mouth open wide in mock shock.
As we gathered around for cake and juice and fake beer, I read a story I’d written about how we wed in Hawaii. It appeared in my book “Snakes, Squirrels & Bears, Oh My! Finding Humor Amid Life’s Frustrations.” The book came out a month earlier, and it detailed a couple of frustrating moments before and after that wedding. However, everything turned out joyful and funny, looking back on it.
Until, that is, Cheryl developed dementia.
Thank you for sharing your experience of so many firsts all at once! Also, thanks for the heads up about that book. I haven't had the courage to read it yet but want to. When going through my mom's papers, I found numerous clippings of things about Alzheimer's. She suspected it before we knew and was searching for answers. That was hard to take "after."