Thursday, November 6, 2008

‘To Love What Is’: Alzheimer’s, Caregiving, and Marriage

“I’m not done loving him.”
These where the quiet words, simply spoken, by a remarkable woman I know in the tenth year of caring for her Alzheimer’s afflicted husband at home. Once gregarious and charming, he is now usually unable to recognize even his beloved wife. Yet, when others laud her decision to keep him at home as somehow selfless or charitable, she quickly corrects them. “It’s not selfless at all,” she says, “He is my husband and I am not done loving him.”
I don’t think I understood her words until tonight.
The Narrative Medicine Program at Columbia University hosts speakers and authors working at the interces of narrative and medicine for our monthly Narrative Medicine Rounds. This evening, I had the honor of introducing political activist, feminist, teacher, and award-winning writer Alix Kates Shulman, who has been hailed by the NY Times as “the voice that has for three decades provided a lyrical narrative of the changing position of women in American society.” Ms. Shulman is the award winning author of 12 books of fiction and nonfiction, and her debut novel, the million copy bestseller “Memoirs of an ExProm Queen” has been called “the first important novel to emerge from the Women’s Liberation Movement,” and it was reissued last year in a 35th anniversary edition as a “feminist classic.” Among her other work are the 1969 essay “A Marriage Disagreement” which suggested the rather radical proposal that a husband and wife divide their household and childrearing tasks evenly, and the 1999 memoir “A Good Enough Daughter” which is about caring for her elderly parents, including a mother who suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease. Tonight, she read from her lyrical new memoir, “To Love What Is: A Marriage Transformed”, which chronicles a love story of husband and wife as they face his traumatic brain injury and her transformation into caregiver.
After a fall from which he was injured but did not die, Shulman’s seventy-five year old husband spiraled into a condition not dissimilar to Alzheimer’s Disease. Although he could remember long term events, his short term memory had all but disappeared. This once articulate and gentle man experienced bursts of rage, flights of imagination mixed with clarity, and although in many ways he was still the same loving individual he had always been, Shulman found herself unable to leave him alone without a constant supervision due to fears for his safety. Her life was transformed, and so was her marriage.
As caregiving advocate Carol Levine has written, caregivers in this nation are 25 million strong and provide nearly $200 billion a year in unpaid labor. Levine describes how, as a graduate student in the 1950’s, she had faced academic committees that frankly told her they would not consider her for a fellowship because she might get married and pregnant. Despite decades of gender progress prompted by the feminist movement, when Levine soon found herself a caregiver to her severely disabled husband after he was injured in a car accident, she was back in world of gendered division of labor. In Levine’s words, “Not only are women the traditional caregivers, they are expected to do more of it, quietly and obediently, without special training. We are assumed to be hardwired for would dressing, feeding tube calibration and wheelchair manipulation..in the prosaic world of chronic illness, it is wives, daughters, sisters, aunts and female friends who constitute the bulk of the caregiving workforce.” (from "Night Shift," in Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies, 2007)
Of course, in the world of caregiving, there is no fair division of labor, no gendered agreement which, like Shulman’s Marriage Contract, suggests that “wife strips beds, husband remakes them.” And Alix Kates Shulman’s remarkable memoir does recount the struggles, frustrations, and sheer loneliness of a caregiver in this position – in raw, honest, sometimes unflinching prose. But what it does in addition, and importantly, is to at the same time remind the reader of her motivation as a caregiver, her deeply committed, loving relationship with her husband.
Weaving together their past love story with their present one, the memoir describes an emergency heart surgery that her husband Scott required in a time before his brain injury. As he is being wheeled in for his operation, he takes hold of her hand and says, by way of potentially last words to her, “I want you to know one thing… that you were truly loved.” In the words of Ms. Shulman herself, “Someone who says a thing like that to you and is saying it truly, you would never abandon no matter what happened.”
Although Shulman very clearly asserts the rights of caregivers to make the their own decisions regarding caring for their loved ones at home or in a nursing home, for the last four years, she has chosen to care for her husband at home, in love. Her memoir is a chronicle of that changed love, the ability not to yearn for that which is not, but to embrace that which is.
“I’m not done loving him.”
Tonight, I’m beginning to understand.

5 comments:

by gregoryp(tm) aka Gregory Pleshaw said...

There is now a picture appended to the blog post about artist Rory Erly Wakemup. http://gregoryp.blogspot.com

Unknown said...

Stories like this gives people a glimmer of hope that pure unconditional love can still exist between persons unbound by blood. I don't mean to sound cheesy but today, it is undeniably difficult to believe that such relationship still happens. To these women, as well as men out there, who selflessly give up a major part of their life to care for their sick and aging spouses with patience, tenderness, and "love", KUDOS!

Unknown said...

I think you have deep knowledge of unconditional love. I dont think so it exists but made to believe. Thanks for writing such a wonderful blog.

Dr. Justin Hoffman said...

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Helga said...

It just proves that unconditional love truly exists..They just supported the promises they made trough sickness and in health.


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