What if your spouse lived in an Alzheimer’s care facility and found a new love there? Would you feel rage and anger – even though you understood he or she no longer knew you or knew where they were?
Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor faced this ordeal publicly last fall. She could have been irate and jealous that her husband of 54 years was spending his days romantically involved with a woman.
Instead, surprisingly, O’Connor was pleased. After 17 years of seeing her husband spiral downhill, she understood that because of his progressive Alzheimer’s disease, which affects memory and behavior, his mind was in another world and he no longer knew who she was.
O’Connor’s public admittance that she was content to see her husband peaceful and happy in his final years helps raise understanding of this dreadful disease.
But arriving at that point of acceptance doesn’t happen overnight, said Ellen Quarry, a Jupiter woman whose husband lived his last years in an Alzheimer’s care facility.
“Intellectually I understood he no longer knew who I was or where he was, but I was still hurt seeing him hold hands with another woman,” she said.
“I remember crying on our anniversary because I so wanted him to say he loved me, but all he did was to sit there and play with his lasagna. He didn’t even recognize me.”
To reach the acceptance O’Connor seems to feel, Quarry, a marriage and family therapist, said she struggled through a long and difficult grieving process.
