My husband has dementia and we were taking Peaches, our dog, for a walk. When she pooped, my husband carefully used his left hand to put a doggie bag on his right hand so that he could pick up the mess. But then dementia entered the picture, and he reached down with his left and picked up the poop. His eyes nearly popped out of his head when he stood up and realized what he had done.

We were sitting in our living room watching TV, but my husband wasn’t really watching. He was staring blankly at the wall next to it. I asked if everything was okay, and he replied, “I want to go home.” So, I asked, “Where is home?” Without any hesitation, he said, “In the attic.”

Sometimes my wife gets lost in the middle of a sentence. The other night, when she was talking about how much she loved our daughter, this is what came out: “She is a good, good, good person………………….in spite of the rain.”

Last night, my wife woke me up at about 2:30 to tell me she was scared. I gave her a big hug, and we chatted until she was feeling better. I was restless for the rest of the night. This morning, she was very apologetic. I told her everything is okay as long as she was now feeling better. She said that she was – but followed that with: “I promise to never burst in on you again when you’re taking a bath.”

My husband has never been particularly handy around the house, and dementia has not improved his skills. When he was taking the wash out of the drier, everything was dry except one pair of Levi’s. The normal response would be to run the drier a little longer for the jeans. His solution, however, was to put the Levi’s back in the washing machine to give it another chance.

We returned from the supermarket and took the shopping bag into the house. As we took the groceries out of the bag, we realized an avocado was missing. My wife went to see if it had rolled out of the bag in the car, but she did not return. I went to check and found that she was repeatedly trying to unlock the car with the garage door opener, which of course was going up and down. At least her explanation made sense to her. “You had the car key, right? I replied “yes.” “Well, that explains it!”

I set the dinner table for two, but my husband prepared three glasses of ice water. I explained that there would only be two of us. This left him with the dilemma of what to do with the extra glass of water. He went to the table and put one glass on each of the two coasters and the third glass on one of the place mats. But this didn’t seem right, so he took one of the glasses off of a coaster and put it next to the glass that was on the place mat. Then he took the coaster that did not have a glass on it and put it on top of the fireplace. The problem was solved.

We needed to clean out a closet, which seemed to be a perfect task for the two of us to do together. It’s just a matter of putting stuff to be given to charity in one pile and stuff to be kept in the other. But when one of the sorters forgets every few minutes which pile is which the chore is unproductive. Even simple tasks like this need a supervisor.

My wife’s belief that Moxie is really two dogs resurfaced one night when she was about to feed Moxie dinner for the second time. I tried to intervene, and she objected, “Maybe you have only one dog, but I have two.”

My husband has developed a habit of rinsing out his water glass three times before putting it in the dishwasher. When I suggested that this was not necessary, he look at me dismissively and responded, “You do it your way, and I’ll do it mine.”

In a discussion about which of our eyes works better, we decided to take a little test. I closed one eye and looked at the view. Then I closed the other and made my judgement. My husband kept both eyes open. He looked to the left and then to the right. The, he concluded they were both about the same.

After fifty happy years of marriage and five years of debilitating Alzheimer’s in which my wife frequently does not remember who I am, she looked at me and with a smile said, “This has been fun the last three or four years. I’m glad we found each other.”