Telling People Now

5th December 2012 Wednesday

My day starts early in the kitchen with our heating engineer draining the boiler while I roll a hundred little cheesy balls in sesame seeds and flaten them into biscuits to bake tomorrow for my husbands’ private view of his Wierd and Wonderful Ceramics.

He says,’You used to have two bells outside your front door.’

I tell him why we only have one now. The other one was for my husband’s office. His face goes completely still when I explain that my husband has Semantic Dementia is. He says the father of a friend of his has developed Altzheizmer’s disease. As if it was the same thing.

I’m searching for olives in Sainsbury’s when my niece rings to say goodbye. Tonight she is on a plane to Katmandu in Nepal where she is volunteering for three months in a very isolated village. I can feel the hugeness of her journey in her voice. Her leaving stirs up echoes in me of all those partings in my life, those wrenching separations, and all those journeys I won’t make now...

In B & Q I dither in the paint section trying to find a colour to compliment the tiny mosaic tile in my hand. It shimmers pink or green or blue depending how the light catches it. I plump for two shades of a pearly sage colour which the assistant mixes up for me in minature pots, spinning them in his machine which looks like a microwave.

As soon as it opens at 4pm I sign up for Susanna Conway’s e-course called Blogging From the Heart and get in a muddle with my email address but she is lovely and friendly in her email and says it will be sorted out. It starts in January - it feels so supportive - something to help me out of my flounderings here on the page. I get so taken up with it that I let the chocolate brownies overcook and burn on the top. 

I start rolling the little sticky balls of fruit and nut truffles in cocoa powder while I wait for our man to come and finish the tiling in the bathroom. He never makes it as he’s stuck in traffic on the M5 after an accident. My husband gets caught up in the same traffic and never makes it to his piano lesson. The builder comes to look at the roof which is still leaking. I told him about my husband yesterday. He asks how he is today.

Later I take a bottle of wine to one of our neighbours as we missed their drinks party on Sunday. Standing in her lobby with the cold blowing in, I tell her about my husband and explain if he sees her in the street and doesn’t say hello it’s not that he’s being rude but just that he won’t know her name even though she may look familiar.

She thanks me and says it’s really helpful to know. She hugs me. It’s feeing harder now, as I tell more people, to not let my husband’s disease become a kind of identity instead of the disability it is....which diminishes both of us.