Leaving

Yesterday my best friend of more than 50 years and I went to lunch, an occasion we have enjoyed each Thursday for a number of years.

She is slowly disappearing, slipping from my grasp. She has an illness called pre-frontal lobe dementia. It is relentlessly and irreversibly turning her into a 79-yr. old woman who speaks a foreign language that is unintelligible to all but herself, and it renders her unable to remember even her own name, the names of her friends and family, or common terminology.

Her visual acuity is still in better shape than her oral ability, so I carry along a set of index cards I call her cheat sheets. I've printed from my computer some large-fonted labels which I've glued onto the cards. When we are talking about one of her children and she has no idea who owns the name which I am repeating to her over and over again, I show her the index card with her child's name boldly printed on it, and her face lights up with recognition. But lately I've noticed that the light sometimes doesn't turn on when I hold up the card. So her visual ability is slipping away, too.

She has always loved Manhattans before our lunches, and even though I would try to steer her to a drink less potent with brain-cell-destroying alcohol in it, she would gently persist until I would relent and make sure she had her Manhattan. But for many months now she has completely forgotten that she ever drank Manhattans. I've been ordering a glass of Chardonnay for her and she has loved it, tilting the glass back to savor every last drop. Yesterday, she drank half of it and forgot it was there. After she had cleaned up her dessert, she suddenly discovered the half-glass of wine and quickly drained it, looking as though she had almost narrowly missed the best part of the afternoon. I know that after drinking the glass of wine she is much more unintelligible, so if there is important or interesting news I wish to share with her, I must do it before she downs the wine.

Sometimes she asks me if I've met her children. My children grew up with her children, and I knew her before she had two of her children. I am momentarily shocked by that kind of question, but I recover somewhat to try to explain.

She has started using a fork as a knife, her frail arthritic hands trembling as she attempts to cut through a complete sandwich with two forks. I clamp my mouth shut to keep from being bossy, hoping she'll realize what she's doing, but finally after she looks up at me with frustration and puzzlement in her eyes, I try to explain.

In the car on the way home she regaled me with a long, expressive excited paragraph on some subject that remained a complete mystery to me. I was fascinated with the strange alien words she was struggling with in her effort to communicate with me. As I drove up her driveway, she put her hand on my knee in a desperate attempt to get through to me. I stopped the car and held and patted her hand and apologized for my lack of comprehension. Tears welled up in her eyes, and with great effort she blurted out "Don't Leave!! Don't want leave!" She had been trying to explain how important our lunches were to her. She didn't want me to leave.

She'll never know how much I don't want her to leave me, either.