EXCERPTS
essay
from the Old French "essai," an attempt
from the Latin "exagium," a weighing
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The act of writing an essay is described by the author Cynthia Ozick as “walking around a thought.” The words of my husband were the thoughts around which I walked. Over the seventeen years of his dementia, Dick spoke or wrote the words that entitle my essays. His observations, neologisms, notes, jokes, songs, and anguished cries appear within the essays, as well. These words capture his voice as we lived through his decline.
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I shaped sentences into some kind of order in the midst of dementia's disorder. Often, I wrote onto the silence of a blank page in the silence of the night, while my husband slept.
More than forty years ago, we chose to construct a home and a life together. We chose to live simply and attentively, drawing water and chopping wood. We sought a balance of body and mind, working with our hands while living in a home brimming with books. Our lives in the cabin's compact quarters were intimate and elemental, the paths to the outhouse and woodpile well-worn.
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During those years we did not envision—could not have envisioned—that we were in training for what was to come. Then the weight of dementia fell. We needed to construct yet another new life. We knew how to live with uncertainty, with the raw and the rude. We'd seize the days to come as best we could.
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Our way of living in the world became our way of living with dementia.
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Excerpt from "We Built It"
Dick Cain. Note to the author, 2005.
(Written during his first hospitalization in a geriatric psychiatric ward)
Like me, my husband probably felt so alone at times. Abandoned. On a few occasions—when I had to leave him at the hospital and, later, at an assisted living home—Dick yelled my name and kicked the door as it closed behind me.
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I anchored him; as long as I was with him, he knew who he was. Actually, the word anchorage might be more fitting. An anchor is a weighty object; an anchorage is a place, a berth where a vessel can be harbored.
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In a poem entitled "To the Harbormaster," Frank O'Hara writes, "To / you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage / of my will." To my husband, I offered my self: the flawed and mortal hull of my body and the worn ropes of my will.
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Excerpt from "We've Been Asked to Say Something Wonderful"
I want to describe the invisible center that was revealed in my husband at times. While in that inner world, Dick was silent. He'd sit motionless for hours, watching the sky or the wind on the water. Dementia's turmoil stilled as he gazed at Lake Superior's roiling waves on an autumn afternoon. He watched as dusk descended over little Doan Lake, watched as darkness deepened.
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He sat, utterly still, before waters both placid and rough, present to the experience. He'd rest his hands in his lap. He didn't speak; he, who loved language so. He moved into and out of that inner place during his final few years.
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Excerpt from "This Crown Is Heavy"
Each night before I go to bed, I pause before this photograph. The left half of his face is in shadow, the right lit by late afternoon sunlight streaming in through a window. Two halves: Light and dark. Life and death.
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Barely touching the cool glass with my index finger, I trace his brow, his eyelids, the long nose, the cheekbones, the chin. I linger at the mouth, slightly curved, content. As I run my finger across the lips, I feel the bristle of his beard on my body. I trace my husband’s image to evoke his presence as I grapple with his absence.
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Excerpt from "This Crown Is Heavy"
Three months before his death, Dick wrote this and then said, "Resistance." He formed the letter D in the same flamboyant cursive he used when writing his name. The D is followed by a gap, then what appear to be the letters sa. The a trails downward, swings upward, and ends with a tail, a tassel—or a lash. Beneath, an agitated scribble. More to say. No way to say it.
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Excerpt from "There's So Much to Say, but I'm Not Capable"