Loving What Is

by Alix Kates Shulman, author of To Love What Is: A Marriage Transformed and Psychology Today's Love and Dementia blog.

In July 2004, my husband, whom I fell for in 1950, tumbled off a balcony, suffering a traumatic brain injury that left him unable to remember anything from that day on or find his way home from across the street. Our marriage, built on equality and mutual support, was radically transformed as I became his caregiver.

People wondered why I didn't place him in a nursing home and get on with my life, not realizing that his dependency brought us closer and infused my life with new purpose. Though his emotional outbursts, typical of TBI, were sometimes difficult to handle, behind his symptoms he remained his gentle, sunny self, dancing with me daily, relishing a cappuccino, thanking me for "sticking by" him.

For the entire first year, I was determined to heal him, like someone possessed. But after I recognized that his cognitive impairment was permanent, I switched my goal to creating for us lives as fulfilling as possible. For him that meant being with me; for me it also meant writing. I hired a caregiver weekdays from 9 to 2 and began writing To Love What Is: A Marriage Transformed, a memoir about his accident and its aftermath. Of all my books, it was the most efficiently written, partly because time was limited; partly because our searing story, a love story, came pouring out of me.

Love, life's natural sweetener, can ease the way to embracing your fate (amor fati, in Nietzsche's phrase), accepting whatever lies in store. If someday I am no longer able to care for him at home, I hope I will adapt gracefully and continue to love what is.

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Read more by Alix Kates Shulman on Psychology Today’s Love and Dementia blog.

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