I Want To Hold Your Hand

 My husband Jeff and I dated in college and subsequently broke up for two and a half years.  Full disclosure, this breakup is entirely on me.  I went back to an ex boyfriend who I was still in love with.  It was complicated.  It always is.  Despite my husband's assurances that we could still be friends and claims that he had been friends with every ex girlfriend he'd ever had, that friendship failed to materialize.  We saw each other occasionally on campus.  After he graduated, we had one awkward movie date, but that was it.  My letters went unanswered. (Remember letters?)

Flash forward to two and a half years after the breakup.  My boyfriend and I have moved out of our apartment after months of discord and one horrifyingly memorable night where we stood in the middle of the road at 2am screaming at one another.  (Weirdly, we are good friends now, and he has no recollection of this.)  We were seeing other people.  We were deeply unhappy.  Out of the blue, Jeff called me.  We talked on the phone for two hours (and I don't usually even like to talk on the phone.)

At that time, Jeff's parents owned a house on Cape Cod.  The conversation ended with him asking me if I'd like to go there the following weekend.  I said yes.  He asked if we could consider it a date.  I impulsively said yes to that too.  I remember what a I wore that Friday night he came and picked me up (white sundress, white canvas sneakers, denim jacket).  I hadn't seen him in a year.  What I really remember though, was how much I wanted him to reach for my hand as we drove in the car.  

I could have reached for his hand, although he was driving and that would have been slightly challenging.  But I was much more handicapped by my own lack of confidence than the logistics of hands on the wheel.  I sat there for at least 45 minutes of the drive, making sure my hand was available and silently willing him to hold it.  Eventually, he did.  Writing about my inability to make the first move makes me feel sort of foolish in retrospect but it was what it was.  I'm not afraid to write about feeling foolish but that's not where I'm headed with this particular post.

Now we flash forward.  Jeff and I have been married for almost 27 years although he hasn't remembered our anniversary for the last two.  This is not because of any inconsideration or guy cluelessness on his part.  It's because he has dementia.  His brain is broken.  The other day we went to the thrift store.  It's one of the few things we still enjoy doing together.  He is not totally blind but he sees very poorly.  The dementia has caused muscle loss and problems with balance and coordination.  Add covid into the mix and there just aren't a lot of things we can go do anymore.

He got out of the car at the thrift store and looked totally disoriented.  He had to lean heavily on the door frame to even step out into the parking lot.  Typical people: open door, unbuckle seatbelt, step out of car, shut car door, walk toward store.  It takes 30 seconds tops.  But it takes Jeff two or three minutes just to get out of the car. Bright sunlight, like we had the other day makes him almost completely unable to see. He's at high risk for falls.  In fact, he took himself for a walk last week and fell dramatically enough that passing cars stopped to check on him.  He fell in the living room a few months ago and sustained a huge gash to the head.

I did what any normal person would do in that moment. I took his hand and guided him into the store.  But I was struck with difference between hand holding as a loving, romantic connection and hand holding as a safety measure.  The memory of us driving to the Cape so many years ago, flashed clearly in my brain and was so at odds with my current reality I almost cried.  I didn't.  I took a deep breath, leaned into the suck and carried on.  In that way, caregiving is like the funny Geico commercials; it's just what you do.