I just texted my 72-year-old straight brother about a film set in the 1950s starring the husky-voiced, steamy Cate Blanchett as one of two lesbian characters whose film relationship ended in a positive way. I’d watched it and wanted to effuse about the novelty of a happy ending. The moment I sent him the note, I realized just how bereft I am. He later told me in the nicest way possible that I need girl friends.
I live in a big city with a large lesbian population. My life here is established and yet, I haven’t been in close contact with a real lesbian for over two years. I miss my dyke friends. I miss their loud laughs, their take-up-space body stance, their steady gaze, their fearless conversation.
My life has changed over the last two years in ways that make socializing next to impossible. We all can relate to that – the virus, lockdowns. But just before that time, a good friend died from dementia. She was one of those gateway friends, socially rich and well loved, the boon of hermits and the awkward. She would know all the movies, all the Beatles and Southern rock albums. Yet months before her death, she had no idea who I was. Our weekly swimming adventure ceased. She died in her sleep and was buried quietly. She was one year younger than me.
Her passing meant that my lesbian universe shrank. It became a single friend, five years my senior, the woman who convinced me to buy a home with her and settle in a domestic partnership for many years. When she announced her decision to move and live with another woman, I was relieved and quietly ecstatic. She moved out of town and began lesbian living with a new love.
The last time we spoke, just a few days ago, she denied being a lesbian.
She hasn’t changed her preference. It’s more like her preference no longer exists. She too is afflicted with dementia. She let me know this a year ago, a time when she still gave me homeopathic advice, understood my frustrations, could recall our rocky relationship. A year ago she could predict my responses, she knew me that well. A year ago she loved her guru, meditated each morning and yearned for Nirvana on earth.
In the past month, each time we speak, I gently remind her of who we are or who we were, that we lived together, that we bought a home together, that we brought up her son together, that we worked in mental health together, that we loved each other. I bring it up because she doesn’t remember. And more frequently, because she asks me.
This woman is the equivalent of my marital spouse. Our life together spans decades, and our knowledge of one another reaches back even farther – to my first softball games, the first bar scenes and first potlucks of dykedom over forty years ago. The ebbing of her memory and the loss of our joint identity cuts me like a dull knife. I want to talk with her and yet at the end of every conversation, I grieve.
My neighbor across the street is 79. When she first moved here from New York state, I’d see her husband exit the front door and gingerly maneuver the flagstones to the street for his daily walk. Now he lives in a nursing home where he has a girlfriend. My neighbor laughed when she told me about this. I laughed too. But that was a year ago. Now, it’s not the least bit funny. But I understand exactly how she must feel.
We are both losing our dearest friends. We are losing archives of our past.
My neighbor is fortunate. She lives with her adult son, who literally contains so much of her identity. I live alone in a big house filled with souvenirs and echoes.
I’m losing my dear friend while she still breathes. It’s all sort of hallucinogenic. She lives in this bliss, unsure of so much but always on this high plane of laughter and sweet words. She tells me about the blueness of the sky, the whiteness of the clouds. Mine is a distant voice she recognizes but she’s not really sure how or why, only that she needs to be kind to me and tell me that she loves me. She talks about her morning walks, about her falls, her bruises, her cat and in 15 minutes, she begins the same conversation all over again. I can’t reach in and pull out any shared memories. They’re gone. The intensity, the grace and wildness and pain and depth of our time together is evaporating. What remains is her sweet voice and a set of scripts that she has apparently memorized.
One day I will call and she will not answer. Or the voice will have changed to a foreign sound that does not toll with mine. The shell that contains those fragments of our life will completely shatter and blow away.
This began some five years ago. She would call herself an “old lady” and I would chide her. I’d tell her not to use those words, because words become identity.
“Old age is not for sissies,” she would say and after a while, I would agree. By then, she had lost her last two partners – one to bone cancer and the other to dementia. I was still alive. Over here, on the phone. Still evaluating and criticizing and wanting more. Now I know: the weight of her grief was unknowable. I believe it was grief that took away her mind.
Much of this came upon me in a matter of moments, after texting my brother.
Dementia is the slow motion prelude to death. And like its dark partner, those who suffer are the ones left behind.
GO BLINDLY 