I remember the idyllic days, chasing each other on the South Carolina beach, falling into the Atlantic with our clothes on like Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in “From Here to Eternity.”
I remember the night he proposed and the day we married, promenading arm in arm through the grocery store in our wedding garb and Ray-Bans, something his comedic role model David Letterman would have done.
I remember telling him I was pregnant. First time. Second time. I remember the phrase I used that convinced him to have Baby Three: “How can we deny life?”
I remember countless family events together, nightly dinners around the table, soccer games, tennis banquets and choir concerts and how seamlessly we tag-teamed when we traveled as a family, whether to our friend’s summer cottage on Lake Michigan or via Eurail the semester he hosted a study abroad in 2002. Steve handled train tickets and hotels. I made sure the kids had the right clothes in their packs.
I also remember the heartbreak of incompatibility.
I remember the moments in the marriage that led to our separation five years ago.
I remember.
But at what point did he begin to forget?
And at what point did I decide to?
Steve was a beloved college professor and world-traveled author, when, four years ago, at the age of 59, he began slipping.
His students told administrators he couldn’t remember where he was in the syllabus or what material he’d covered the day before. They were concerned something was wrong. Even his banker noticed.
A battery of tests confirmed what was suspected. On an icy morning in January, with our youngest child and me looking on, Steve was told he had frontotemporal dementia. He was also told that because his particular disease was considered “early onset,” it would progress quickly and that he should quit teaching and driving.
By then, Steve and I were separated. Memories of our 30 years together were already mixed and muddled as I attempted to reconcile a marriage ending. There had been post-separation attempts at healing conversation and mutual understanding. But now, with the diagnosis of dementia, I could no longer seek context with the only other person on the planet who knows the story of our lives together.
Nor did I necessarily want to.
Dementia erased not only his memory, but what used to matter so much.
For three-and-a-half years, nothing mattered except providing unconditional care for a fellow human helpless against a hapless fate. We all rallied around him, trying to keep him in his own home, surrounding him with the things and ideas that spoke of who he was instead of who he was becoming.
As time went on, memories became less important than keeping him safe, as the support group folks started telling us not to ask him, “Remember when?,’’ as this only caused anxiety when he couldn't remember.
This is the tragedy of memory, wrote American writer Lois Lowry in "The Giver": “The worst part of memory isn’t the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”
Steve eventually moved into a facility, some short 14 months ago. And now he is gone, leaving this earth just before dawn on a cool morning in late September with his family looking on.
We are left to share collective memories — the outpouring from students and colleagues has been nothing short of miraculous — but also individual memories and stories that only each of us knows.
All these stories shape the life of a man. All these help us decide who he was.
And yet we will never know fully.
All we can do when someone dies is remember what we choose to remember, as we fill in the blanks of our grief.
“For my purposes I can’t get out of my head a Jimmy Buffett cover of a Van Morrison song Steve used to serenade me with 30-40 years ago: "Do you remember when we used to sing?"
I was his brown-eyed girl.
