In 2004 my wife Kathy was diagnosed with dementia. Over the next eleven years we learned it was likely Alzheimer’s. On March 6, 2015 she died of congestive heart failure. During those eleven years of Alzheimer’s I kept a journal of our lives and our coping. After she died I continued keeping the journal, but now it was a journal of grief over her loss first to the white-out blizzard of Alzheimer’s and then to death. I also published essays about her and my experience with these losses.
From 2004 to 2024 I also wrote poetry about this experience. I have collected the poems in a volume called Where You Were and Are No More. This sextet of poems here is a distillation of the experience. I have dated the composition of the poems. The first three were written during her disappearance into Alzheimer’s and the last three after her death. Together, they are the most succinct understanding one is likely to find about losing a dearly loved spouse to dementia and then to death.
All Together Again
I will remember
the sun on the trees
along Walloon.
I will remember
my mother in her tired housedress
hardly speaking all her life.
I will remember
my father’s anger fixing things
always going wrong.
I will remember
my sons as they were
when young.
I will remember
my wife when she
could still remember.
I will remember
to put us all
together again.
9/3/09
My Own Private September
(imagining a future when my sweetheart would be gone)
The cereal bowl I put out
for you today,
The used floss I stepped on
yesterday,
The way when I carried weight
you held the door,
The way at night before we slept
you said I love you,
The way when we woke and I smiled
you said thank you,
The way you used to wave goodbye
with your hand held high,
Your smile the size of the sun
that always made me grin,
The way we held hands everywhere
and now nowhere,
The face I thought I’d see again
but didn’t then,
All these things I will remember,
my own private September.
1/9/13
Poem in Winter
On an early winter morning
when the light that slipped round
the window shades was barely gray,
I watched her face for an hour,
some of the time sleeping with mouth open,
some of the time looking back at me.
We said little, just looked,
the hurry of life no longer with us.
In this hour of gray light
only her soul and her smile
and what they said:
go slow, we won’t get there anyway.
11/13/13
Today It Rained
Today it rained
and I thought of you.
You were my weather
and my compass,
my north, my south,
my east and west.
You were my path and my footfalls,
the reason I went,
now no needle or dial,
no reason to go,
I’m nobody nobody sent.
6/1/15
November Roses
Alone again this November morn
I learned what animals know newly born:
he who plucks roses
harvests grief as well as grace.
All season long I clipped none,
let them live in the sun.
These were the last of the year,
what harm to pluck them now?
Thorns pierced my fingers again and again
but oh how dear to cut and hold each one
that I might lay them in a vase
before my wife’s remembered face.
11/28/18
Now That You’re Gone
We shall never again
look into each other’s eyes.
We shall never again
hear the timbre of our voices.
We shall never again
hug together our bodies.
Now that you’re gone
I look across the air
of the rooms where we were
to find only more air
and no one there,
only memories of the way we were.
As the lights go out
along the shore
I will think of where you were
and are no more.
11/9/23