The Autumn of His Life

 

It’s a beautiful autumn day here and it strikes me how autumn is a good analogy for our life right now.  The “fall” part of it is pretty obvious since falling is now a near daily occurrence but so is change.

 

It’s been several days since I’ve had a coherent conversation with him; instead of having hallucinations and delusions, he’s living in the them.  There is no way to anticipate what’s going to happen next.  And there was certainly no way to anticipate what happened just now.

 

We had a normal conversation.  Nothing particularly interesting, but normal.  For the last 10 minutes, we had a regular, mundane conversation.  No mention of a hand-claw scurrying across the room on dagger-like talons, no imaginary skunks in the tissue box.  A regular conversation.

 

And frankly, that’s worse. 

 

I have been trying to adjust to our new life where, when he recognizes me at all, I’m the guest star in his hallucinations.  Trying to play along with the delusions and manage deep wounds caused by words he doesn’t really mean to say.  I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it, but I’m trying.

 

But then, in the middle of it all… normal.  He was saying he thinks Don Henley wrote the song “New York Minute” and commenting on the powerful use of music on the “West Wing.”  It’s a variation on a conversation we’ve had before but that felt good.  Familiar.  And I thought, perhaps, the rapid decline was a fluke and things would stabilize, go back to some manageable semblance of normal. 

 

And like the autumn leaves, it didn’t last too long before it came crashing down.  As I write this, he is talking to dead relatives in the closet.

 

And winter edges ever closer.