This Marriage Thing

Hi Dina,

well I took my marriage vows to heart ( in sickness and in health) so I guess I'll be caring with assistance of course for him until he takes his last breath.

I can't imagine leaving my husband or him leaving me. I can imagine one of us needing to be in a care facility and frankly, it scares me to death. It would be our last resort and our plan is to bring care into our home unless that becomes impossible. As for decisions, the final decision is with the ailing person until he or she is not mentally competent and then the other one of us takes over.

Thanks to my husband, we've discussed this long enough to make some decisions and to draw up a legal document. I would be in total denial if he didn't force us to look at this.

When my wife was involved in chemo for breast cancer, she pretty much checked out of things like housework and childcare. I had to take the baton and run with it. Of course, that's what you sign up for in a marriage. In sickness and in health.

I also think it's important to have disability insurance, just in case some horrible thing happens.

But even in that case, even if one person needs a nursing home and 24-hour care, that doesn't have to mean that the relationship is over or that one person leaves the other. The healthy spouse can visit the impaired spouse, help with meals, bathing, and climb into bed and lie next to him/her. When my father-in-law could no longer care for my mother-in-law because of Alzheimer's, he spent several hours a day at the nursing home--and not out of obligation. It was truly a labor of love.

I've been waiting for this topic to come up, but didn't know quite how to broach it myself. I see that the first few responses assume "traumatic", "dramatic" disbility. What if that's not quite the case?

In 1996, 9 months after buying our first house, raising an 8 year old daughter, my husband got hurt on the job (back injury). I was 30, he was 34. We were just starting out, planning more children, young and active. Now what? Believe me, that was more than a loaded question.

For the next four years, the doctors kept him at work on light duty, though he had "incidents", relapses about every year or so. In March 2000, he relapsed for the last time and hasn't recovered. He's now permanently disabled.

He's not yet 45, but has handicap license plates and walks with a cane. He can no longer sit, stand, walk or sleep normally and because of the powerful pain meds he takes daily, is having trouble with memory.

We have been gradually going down a road of more and more dependency, less and less outside activity, and endless pain for a long time. I'm still here because, like a lot of you, my vows said in sickness and in health, but the reality is that I feel like we're in our 80's instead of our 40's.

I went from raising a child to raising a child along with caring for a spouse, and now I'm facing the possibility of caring for my mother while caring for my spouse. Sometimes I wonder why I am destined to never get a life where I get to take care of me.

There won't be any golden years for us of glorious retirement. I have 20 more years to work before I can collect mine. Judging from the progress of his injury over the past 11 years, my spouse will be wheelchair bound long before then, on stronger and stronger meds for pain.

My answer is this. The "needs" of the ailing spouse come first. I won't pretend that there are no hard feelings ... that comes with the daily living pressures ... but we're sticking it out. Like a twelve-step program, we just take each day as it comes. What else can you do?

As we get closer to the time that that is a possibility, we will move to a place where there is a convenient ice floe. The one whose synapses stop firing will get an unplanned one-way trip ... with a hungry polar bear for company.

In case of miraculous recovery, the one who still has all his or her marbles will pack a few peanut butter sandwiches to use to mollify the bear. If the bear is not hungry, maybe he can snuggle until they hit the point where global warming turns ice to water. I also hears bears can swim hundreds of miles so all will be well no matter who survives.

The greater likelihood is that we will not have that particular issue. With me, the way I am anyway, there is no way to tell if I have lost my marbles so I am safe! As long as my wife can find a shopping center, she will be fine too. She seems to have an inner compass that points to the nearest Bloomies. From what I have seen of the many shoppers there, when I accompany her to the store, it doesn't seem that either sanity or common sense is required to function within their parameters - just money.