When Dear Ones Start to Fade . . .

Guest column by Christine Herbes-Sommers

How do we write to loved ones who have Alzheimers? There are two in my life now, a poet and my Dutch love.  I can’t be with either of them at the moment but, alone in a new city now, I long to connect. 

With the Poet, there was lovely language, laughter, tenderness.  She was a master gardener and generous with advice and cuttings.  She was working on her ninth book of narrative poems.  Her husband, a doctor with whom I enjoyed sparring, is now gone. She never could write a check.  He calculated every log he split to warm their Vermont home.

With Dutchie, there were words of deep love, charged attraction that could fly across the metaverse, and politics — all in his quirky brand of English.  He occasionally wore red pants — not khakis and not as a fashion statement.  In my mind, his most famous aphorism was “If there’s no solution, then there’s no problem.”  He loved chaos. He is my son’s godfather. We discovered each other after thirty years of knowing, but not saying and not acting on, the fact that we were the love of each other’s lives.

These were relationships with nuance and history. They shaped my universe, as friendships do. They were as exciting as they were comforting; as silly as they were wise. If I were to think of myself as a hot air balloon — not such a stretch of the imagination! — they were among the ropes and hooks that would guide me aloft and bring me back to earth, gently, most of the time.

So I feel desperate to connect with them. Do I write simply, shouting short words as if they were deaf? Do I write the same emails or letters two or three times, increasing the chance that they would stick? Do I write in pictograms?

Or do we just let these lovely life connections take a different natural course? Do we let them go? Do we love them as sandcastles on the beach, crumbling with each oncoming wave?

Do we rebuild them in different forms, which means rebuilding ourselves? I can imagine sitting with the Poet, listening to her tell the same story twice, three times in a single conversation. I can also imagine reading Emily Dickinson or William Stafford to her, and seeing the quickening in her eyes. I can imagine being content with that and allowing the soft silences to fill with memories.

With Dutchie — that’s a different thing. I will not see him again, ever. It’s hard to be content with that, without actively loving him and feeling his love in return. The idea hurts right smack in the sternum, where sadness takes its bodily form. But it’s necessary to accept it all — the fact that it will always hurt, and that I’ll always be grateful for him.

Such is the surprising confusion of becoming old. It requires fortitude, a new inventiveness.

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Christine Herbes-Sommers was a Cambridge, MA-based PBS documentary producer for forty-five years. A dyed-in-the-wool Yankee, she spent the last four years in North Carolina studying classical art, and is now delighted to return north to a new home in Stone Ridge, NY.