The Personals. Brian O’Connell
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I’d driven away from the house they were still with me. They are in my mind now in this half farmhouse, where two adults are reframing their relationship, forgotten fragment by forgotten fragment.
The man’s wife tells me that his dementia and diagnosis of Alzheimer’s has been a relatively recent discovery, or more accurately, that she didn’t know her husband had been diagnosed until recently. ‘I felt there was something going on,’ she says. ‘He was short-tempered and not totally focused on certain chores we would share. He wouldn’t do them, or he would forget where the keys were. Those things didn’t come in one day – it was over a period of a week. The biggest thing that made me go to the doctor with him was the fact that he wasn’t concerned about how he was dressed. He would forget things. More and more he would forget where keys were or that he put milk in the fridge without using it; silly little things really.’
Throughout these changes her husband didn’t seem particularly bothered, she says. When he got frustrated, he would lose his temper a little and it could be over the smallest of things. For example, if she asked him if he’d put the kettle on and make coffee, he might get a little hot-tempered and react by saying he was always doing it. She believes now that he has had dementia since 2016, and that Alzheimer’s developed after that. He is aware that he has Alzheimer’s, but doesn’t accept that the change in his life is due to the condition. There should be a lot more help and support for families like theirs, she says, and sometimes she feels alone and abandoned by state services. There are practical things that need to be done, such as signing the house over to their children, which he is reluctant to do.
‘He is changing into someone else,’ she says. ‘I could put my arms around him today and say, “I love you”. I could whisper in his ear that we had a great life and sometimes his response will be more measured. He might agree and say, “Remind me again how many years we are together?” But I could do the same thing later in the day, especially in bed, and he will push me away and say, “Stop that now, I have to sleep.” It’s hard to know how he will react sometimes.’
She says he can be very curt and sharp with her, and often if she is upset or crying he won’t stop what he’s doing to ask how she is and will simply walk by, oblivious to her feelings. She tries to continue to treat him as normally as she can, especially in front of other people. It would hurt him if she treated him any differently. Increasingly, she has been taking him with her when she has to leave the house. This is partly because it’s good for him to get out and about and not isolate himself, but also, at least when he is with her she knows he is safe and won’t wander down the road or leave the door open.
Of course she worries about the future, and she worries too about how much longer she will be able to manage the situation. She’s done a lot of research into the condition and she believes that often it follows the personality and character of the person living with it. ‘In general terms, if the person is a quiet gentle partner and takes things in their stride and is easy-going, then often that is how it will be for them,’ she says. ‘My husband has always been active and forthright, like me, and he could lose his temper on certain things, so his illness is a manifestation of that.’
She’s aware that he’s in the early stages of the illness. The medication available can slow it down, and while it does have an impact, she wishes she had known about her husband’s diagnosis sooner. Maybe he forgot to tell her, or a letter from his consultant might have been mislaid. Either way, she feels huge guilt for having arguments with him about forgetting certain things, when all along he had been given the dementia diagnosis and she didn’t know about it.
‘He was the kind of man that if anything in the house needed mending, he was on top of it,’ she says. ‘Now, if a radiator leaks, he will say, “I will fix it” and often it will be leaking even more afterwards. If I say anything, he will blame me for it and tell me to do it myself. I’m telling you all this because it’s not easy and there are significant challenges, and it’s heart-breaking to see someone you love change so much.’
As he tidied up she watched and tried not to make it obvious that she was overseeing what he was doing. We moved to the sitting room, where she produced a velvet pouch and began taking out rings. She was very deliberate in how she handled them, having taken them from an old shoebox which also contained several letters and some other items of jewellery. To my surprise, it turns out that the rings didn’t belong to her. ‘They’re my late mother’s rings,’ she says. ‘And she never wore them.’
The box contained two rings. One was an engagement ring made of 18 carat white gold. To my untrained eye it looked more like yellow gold, but most people would describe it simply as a diamond cluster ring. The wedding ring was also 18 carats, again white gold, and it was more modest than the engagement ring. Both came with their certificates and valuation forms. While she’s connected to them emotionally, I don’t get the sense that they are treasured deeply. There’s something in the way she holds them in her hand – the casualness perhaps, or the fact that there’s a firm-handedness in her movements with the rings. When I suggest this, she corrects me. ‘They do mean an awful lot to me,’ she says, ‘but I can’t keep them because I think they are better off on somebody’s finger, rather than just shutting them away in a safe.’
When she told me that they had been her mother’s and never worn, of course I thought of all sorts of heart-breaking reasons why. But she tells me that her mother had gone ahead with the marriage. In fact, it had been her second marriage. And the reason she hadn’t worn the rings was fairly simple – she had still been in love with her first husband. How had her second husband responded to that? ‘He respected it. You see, my parents loved each other very much, but they couldn’t live together. The marriage was very difficult when they were living together but they became best of friends after they divorced.’
We’re talking here about the mid-1970s, when the seller’s mother had remarried. At that stage, she had been separated from her first husband for about six years. Sadly, she passed away some years ago in a nursing home in England, while the seller’s father moved to Eastern Europe, where he also remarried. While they were both alive, they had kept in touch. And the last time her mother and father actually met each other? ‘It was at my brother’s funeral,’ she tells me. ‘He had a heart attack and died suddenly. My father came home and he stayed alongside my mother at the funeral, sitting really close beside her. It was clear the connection was still there. I think they both had the same type of character and personality – the same type of short fuse.’
Telling me the story of her parents’ divorce and their subsequent friendliness towards each other, she says she doesn’t want to over-romanticise it. It’s not just the story of two people thrown together and then pulled apart and yet still there for each other at the end. Her parents had separated after a period of time when the arguments between them became worse as their children moved through their teenage years. She doesn’t want to go into it too much, but those years left their mark and did have an impact on her in later years. Luckily, when her mother remarried, her daughter always got on very well with her stepfather. She describes him as a fantastic man, and totally in love with her mother.
‘He was a gentleman. A small man. Very, very polite and very gentle,’ she says. ‘He loved my mother so much. He would do anything for her. When she started getting ill, he gave up his job and he waited on her hand and foot. He would buy her anything, take her wherever she wanted to go. And when she had to go to a nursing home, he gave up work and went and sat with her every single day. He absolutely idolised her.’
When the man had given her mother the engagement and wedding rings now on the table in front of me, what did she do with them if she didn’t wear them? ‘She had a chain,’ her daughter tells me, ‘which I have, and she put the two rings on a silver chain and put it around her neck. And she went through the rest of her life with no rings on her fingers. I also have her first wedding rings. These ones are too valuable to be just left in a safe. To me these two rings are beautiful but I don’t feel the same connection with them as her first wedding rings. I idolised my stepfather but he has also given me the right and the blessing to sell them.’
The rings are now for sale for €2,000. She would