Dementia in a Former Loved One

This is a hard post to write

By now, most of you know I’m in Year Three-and-a-half of a divorce. I won’t go into (hopefully!) any details about my former wife, as she has always been a private person as well as a successful businesswoman, and her niece who has been her assistant for the past fifteen years has made it clear her wishes are to keep it that way.

Not My Former Wife

Not Me

Suffice to say that while we started out as a couple in the early 1980s at a similar level of success (very little!), her career took off while mine encountered a number of ups and downs. To be fair, she pushed ahead on her career path obsessively, while I had so many things I wanted to work on that focusing on any one thing was, and remains, an issue….

When we finally got to trial about a year and a half ago, I got my first good look at my estranged wife in quite a while—the woman I’d been with for forty years, and was married to for thirty-five of them before splitting up. She didn’t even look the same—she’d lost a lot of weight, and not in a good way like my Mom had after she and Dad had divorced!

The judge told our attorneys to “Settle this, now.” The attorneys did, and both of us agreed it was a fair settlement—then the judge stopped everything and rapid-fired a series of questions at my ex-wife, which she stumbled on the answers to most of! I was horrified, because stress always makes her flustered and forgetful—our first quarter-century together it was my job to run interference for her, and later when she could afford to hire assistants it was theirs. After that the judge said, “I don’t believe this woman is competent to handle her own affairs—I’m appointing a GAL* for her.”

She’s been having some issues with her memory for a while, but when she’d gone to the doctor for tests while we were still together she’d been told, “It’s minor memory loss, it doesn’t seem to be significant—we’ll keep an eye on it, but our prognosis is that it’s advancing very slowly and probably won’t amount to anything serious.” I was upset that the judge had done that to her, and told my attorney so—his response was, “She thinks your ex-wife has Alzheimer’s.”

I tried to talk to my ex to ask…something, because we had been together for four decades. Her niece steered her away and gave me a “Don’t you come over here!” glare—so I didn’t.

A few months back, her niece sent a group e-mail informing everybody who knew her that she had a brain tumor, small and close to the surface, and the doctors were going to remove it. I wrote to ask if I could help, and what I got back was “YOU BETRAYED US BY LEAVING FOR NEW YORK CITY!!! GO AWAY AND DON’T WRITE HER, EITHER!” So once again, I respected her wishes…and didn’t.

By then, I’d moved from the apartment I was renting as office space in Upstate NY back to the Tri-State Area (Jersey City), which meant that I was back with the friends we’d left when my then-wife decided she wanted a house with a yard, and the place to look was six hours away from New York City where we’d met, gotten married, and lived for over a quarter-century. While it’s more expensive and far from perfect, I feel a lot happier than I felt as a co-homeowner upstate, and able to accomplish more than I ever felt as a co-homeowner in Upstate NY.

The reason I‘m writing about this is because there’s been a lot of talk about “dementia” in the news lately—Trump accuses Biden of it while exhibiting obvious signs of it himself; Biden who seemed like maybe he was “sundowning” in 2020 returns in 2024 sounding thirty years younger, vigorous, and eager to engage his opponent; and Bruce Willis got slapped around a lot for starring in cheap movies where he had his lines read to him via earpiece and refused to do more than one take, only for his family to finally admit he’s suffering from aphasia, and he’d lined up as many quick paydays as he could while he felt he could still function on-screen. And here I am, watching the woman I loved and married (something I never thought I’d do!) pull away from me just as she’s fading away from me forever….

I don’t have any deeper thing to say about this than—hug your loved ones, and tell them you love them while they still can understand.
_____

* “Guardian ad Litem”—“A Guardian Ad Litem (sometimes referred to as GAL) is someone appointed by the Surrogate’s Court for those individuals who cannot come to Court or cannot protect their rights and interests on their own….A Guardian Ad Litem can be appointed in cases involving children, incapacitated persons, incarcerated people, or for individuals who are unknown or cannot be located.”
- From RK Law PC in New York City’s website