DEAR JUDY

In this memoir, a man recounts his wife’s struggles with Alzheimer’s disease and his own challenges as her principal caregiver.

James and his wife, Judy, were intellectually vibrant “creatives” who met while studying art in college. During their four decades of marriage, Judy in particular was blessed with a remarkable memory and her “mental acuity defined her.” But the author began to notice “cognitive blips” and “increasingly noticeable ‘hiccups,’ ” various expressions of what looked like signs of cognitive impairment. In 2009, Judy was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease, a condition that slowly started to overtake her life. She began to wrestle with the demands of work—Judy was an artist and a college lecturer—and the complaints from students began to pour in. Her short-term memory all but vanished—immediately after watching a movie or TV show, she forgot it entirely. Eventually, she had to abandon driving, and she experienced considerable losses in mobility—even bathing and going to the bathroom on her own became impossible. James became her care provider and was forced to travel through the “alien territory of dementia,” a journey he conveys with bracing candor and impressive thoughtfulness. With emotional poignancy, he chronicles—both through the book’s account and heartfelt letters he sent to his deceased wife—the emotional and practical throes of managing Judy’s condition until the very end, when her self-consciousness “evaporated” and she was put in hospice care. James captures with an artist’s sensitivity the peculiar experience of caring for a loved one whose personality slips away: “She had a disease for which there was no effective or long-term treatment and for which there was no cure. We had no experience of it from which to try to squeeze even a tentative action plan. We learned that it would take the person she was and, piece by piece, erase that person and nearly everything she ever knew or felt or imagined.” This is a beautifully heartbreaking memoir and should be a source of edification and comfort to anyone with a similar experience.

A sadly tender and fiercely intelligent remembrance of a loved one and loss.