A Year of Firsts

In which my personal seasons haven't always matched what's noted on the calendar.

Photo by Alekon pictures on Unsplash

Father’s Day is coming up next weekend, the first one Mike will spend in memory care. I’d already decided that I wasn’t going to say anything to my adult children about this; managing their relationship with their dad is still their business, not mine, even in this complicated context—and I know from experience that it isn’t helpful to have a parent around who’s constantly telling you what you need to do.

The only thing I’ve said to my kids about visiting Mike is that they need to manage this time in a way they’ll be able to live with, since they will be the only ones living with the choices they’re making now. Mike isn’t usually aware of who’s visiting him—sometimes he seems to recognize me, but often not—and he has no concept of how often this happens or how long those visits last.¹

But my daughter was the one who brought it up. She told me that she planned to come down on Sunday and asked about the best time for us to visit Mike. At that point I texted my son, told him about his sister’s plan, and said he was free to join us if he wanted. Which he did.

And so, on Sunday, we’ll all go make a visit together. We’ll have whatever sort of Father’s Day celebration we can manage: if the activity room (where some residents are still able to do jigsaw puzzles and art projects) is free, maybe we’ll gather there. If it’s not too hot, maybe we’ll spend some time in the courtyard. Or perhaps we’ll all just huddle around a table in the dining room.

When I first moved Mike into memory care, I fully intended to bring him home for special occasions like this. But the more I thought about that plan, the more I realized that those visits would be for my benefit, not his; they’d make me feel like a devoted partner, doing the right thing for the one I love. They’d probably just make Mike feel anxious, wondering why he was suddenly in a strange place.

After all, I reminded myself, after spending a few hours at the dementia day care program that he attended for 18 months, Mike would sometimes walk into the house where we’d lived for 25 years and said, “Wow! What is this place? It’s really nice!”

I don’t know why, but I’ve always hated the language of seasons when it’s used to describe anything other than the Julian or meteorological calendar. Some people are friends for only a season makes me want to gnash my teeth. Maybe it’s the imprecision of the language that bugs me—this sentence doesn’t usually mean to say Some people are only friends for three months of each year. On top of that, friendships don’t end inevitably, like seasons do. When they do come to a close, that happens as a result of the choices we make (including the passive choice to grow apart.)

But I started to rethink my feelings about the concept of human seasons after watching a video in which a woman spoke of her father’s recent death. She noted that, after the long process of losing him to dementia, the current season of her personal life wasn’t matching up with what was on the calendar; she wasn’t feeling either celebratory or enlightened as we approach the summer solstice (which, this year, happens to coincide with Father’s Day.) She was in a dark place, and likely to stay there for a while.

“I know this season of my life will turn, eventually,” she said. “But I also know that’s going to happen on my own time—not when the calendar says it should.”

Her comment reminded me of this past Valentine’s Day, when I felt such profound sorrow over losing Mike—despite the fact that we never even celebrated that silly greeting card holiday. And, of course, he’s still alive, so the idea of losing Mike is complicated in itself. Then I remembered the grief I felt over my father’s death, which didn’t hit me until several months after he’d actually died. One day I came home from work and, for no particular reason, sat down in a chair and sobbed because I was living in a world that no longer included my dad.

I thought about all of this, and then I decided that our human lives do, in fact, have natural seasons: love, loss, and grief are just a few. They’re unavoidable periods of existence here on planet Earth. They just happen to cycle through our days without regard to where the sun might be in the sky.

For the past eight months, I’ve been walking through the calendar year without any clear idea of how to approach that project—how to celebrate Christmas, or New Year’s Eve (which also happens to be my wedding annniversary) without Mike. Nothing about the way my family used to navigate the year feels right anymore, because we’re not the same family we used to be. The four of us live in four different places now. And, perhaps more importantly, we live in in two different worlds, one of which exists only inside Mike’s head.

His birthday is next month. He’s going to be 62 years old. He’s six months younger than I am, though there’s no one left with whom I can joke about having married a younger man. I don’t know how we’ll celebrate that day—I can’t bring a cake for all to share, because so many residents have to follow specialized diets. I’ll probably default to bringing him a frosted sugar cookie. Easy to eat, and they’ve always been Mike’s favorite.

After that, there are no big holidays to share with him before we mark the end of our year of firsts. That year began with my realization that I couldn’t care for Mike on my own any longer, followed by his move into memory care.

I think that realization marked the end of another season, too—my own personal season of belief that I could always be everything Mike would ever need.

1. I know there are people who will disagree with me on this point. All I’m going to say is that I have plenty of first-hand experience to suggest that Mike isn’t making distinctions between his family members and any other person he might encounter in the course of a day.