Snapshots of Dementia: Great Expectations
Geralt on Pixabay Don’t have unrealistic expectations of your spouse. I had that advice drilled into me even before my marriage. I learned not to expect Tom, who had been raised in a far different family setting from mine, to do, say, or think things exactly as I did. I learned not to expect Tom, who was a pastor and spiritual leader, to be the perfect husband and father any more than I could be the perfect wife. And I learned that neither of us should expect the other to change. Instead, Tom and I learned, albeit slowly and sometimes painfully, to talk and pray through our differences. Sometimes he changed. Sometimes I changed. More often than not, we both did. Having an increasingly loose hold on expectations has helped me survive without too many scars before and since our living-with-dementia journey. I say “increasingly loose” because as Tom’s dementia changes him, I must change my expectations too. I wrote about how he stopped taking care of our lawn a few years before we knew he was LWD. Once I realized he was not going to take care of it (although I had no idea dementia was a factor), I stopped expecting him to do so. But when we packed up our Florida home, downsized, and moved to South Carolina in November nearly four years ago, it bothered me somewhat that Tom didn’t help at all. He didn’t sort a single item or pack a single box. In fact, his attempt to box up the theology books he sold to an online bookstore became an organizational disaster that brought me hours of extra work. That incident helped lower my expectations. I understood: Tom could no longer pack. And I didn’t want him to. At that time, since we didn’t have any sort of dementia diagnosis for Tom, I was still operating in a not-so-magical neverland, not knowing what he could and couldn’t do or what I should and shouldn’t expect. After he lost three jobs in a row, I decided he could no longer work. I no longer expected him to do so. After he had some near-misses with the car, our family decided he could no longer drive. We no longer expected him to do so. And after both of these changes and more, I decided to move closer to family—whether or not Tom’s doctors ever agreed he had a problem. I no longer expected him to have the wisdom to make such a big decision in a wise, caring way. All of these decisions shaped our expectations of Tom. But none of us had a real idea how much the expectations would continue to shift as we went along. Here...
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