"We're getting a divorce"

Those words surely have to be some of the most difficult to utter to your friends. It must be even worse if the person saying them doesn't realise what they are saying.

A friend called in unexpectedly yesterday. "I know you are probably busy but I really need to talk." I put the kettle on. She sat there saying nothing while I made her a pot of tea. I put everything in front of her. Then I sat down and gave her my full attention.

She didn't know whether to laugh or cry or feel something else. Her husband has an "early onset" form of dementia. He is not yet sixty but the family made a recent decision to place him in residential care. There was a good reason for this. He has become increasingly angry and violent. The last really serious episode left her in hospital for several days and she has more than one scar as a result of previous episodes.  

In residential care there are similar problems but various mixes of medication are being tried. He won't be going home but they hope they can find a way of calming him down enough for him to function at some level while not being a danger to anyone else. 

My friend goes to see him most days. Sometimes he knows who she is and sometimes he doesn't. Yesterday she wasn't sure how much he understood but he had told her, "We're getting a divorce." 

"I think he thought he meant it too. When he is lucid he tells me he hates me and he wants to get out of there. Then he will tell me he still loves me. I don't know what to believe any more. Things have been so difficult for so long."

I just let her talk on and on. I didn't offer any advice. I couldn't. I know absolutely nothing about such things. It was her words, "Things have been so difficult for so long" that really set me thinking.  

Their marriage is one I would have thought was stable. They seemed happy enough until the dementia issue. The family and everyone around them expected some problems then but had there been problems before that? I don't know. I saw them out together occasionally but I cannot remember how close they seemed to be. There won't be a divorce of course. He won't be considered competent to make such a decision even if wished to do so.  As a deeply religious and church going Catholic she has no intention of divorcing him. 

She talked on and on. Occasionally I would slip in a question if she was talking about the good times, a question to try and encourage her to think about the good things. I don't know if it helped or not.

After she had gone I sat staring at the computer screen for a while. It had gone blank and dark while she was there. I thought it was a bit like his brain which is going blank and dark too. I wondered what my late fiancé would have been like if he was alive now, if we had been able to marry and perhaps have children. What would he, one of the most gentle and thoughtful of people, have been like if he had been diagnosed with dementia at that age? I like to think he might not have changed that much, that he would still have been loving and caring. 

Dementia is a bastard of a condition. I watched my friend walk off to her own home. She is going to walk in the door and be surrounded by all the memories. They might be good memories but there are some dreadful memories now mixed in. He is still there in her life but not there either. She still has a responsibility but is getting nothing in return. All I can do is go on making her pots of tea.