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Strange Relation: A Memoir of Marriage, Dementia, and Poetry
Rachel Hadas
By
Published: Jul 30, 2011
Category:
Memoir
Rachel Hadas is Board of Governors Professor of English at Rutgers, the author of 19 books, a poet for whom an appearance in The New Yorker is not a life event.
Forty years ago, when she was not yet celebrated, I knew her as the college poet — the Unattainable Woman. She thought at the highest level; I wrote prose that looked an awful lot like journalism. I felt unnoticed.
Recently, randomly, we met again. And caught up. The conversation was domestic, not literary. I had married late, married often, was the oldest father in America. She had married once, in 1978, to George Edwards, a composer and professor of music at Columbia. When she was 56 and he was 61, he was diagnosed with early-onset dementia and, in effect, vanished. She had recently published a book, a memoir. Before she asked me to read it, to help it, I volunteered.
“Time, the subtle thief of youth…”
“Strange Relation: A Memoir of Marriage, Dementia, and Poetry” is not like any other love-and-loss memoir. It’s a poet’s book, a teacher’s book, the book of a woman who has written a great deal and read even more. All of poetry is in her head; with her chatty husband now mute, “literature was my best friend.”
What she’s too modest to claim: It is literature she makes here. [To buy “Strange Relation” from Amazon, click here.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1589880617/?tag=headbutlercom-20 For the Kindle edition, click here.] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004NSUYWY/?tag=headbutlercom-20
In fact, she’d written about George’s condition two years before he was diagnosed. In the poem, she rushes around, "bringing the world” to her silent husband. "My poems have always known much more than I know," she told an NPR interviewer. “My subconscious appears to be smarter and much braver than the rest of me."
Maybe. Consider the clear-eyed courage it takes to write this:
You’re married to someone; you have presumably made a commitment, and you trustingly assume a relation of lasting reciprocity with the person you have chosen to spend the rest of your life with. But slowly and insidiously your partner changes from the person you married into someone else, someone who, while he still dwells alongside you, no longer cares about your well-being, who may in fact actively wish you ill.
Her memoir is dotted with poems she writes to mark the stages of her husband’s disease and her isolation from him. And it’s dotted with references to poetry you may never have read and myths you never learned. For all that, “Strange Relation” is also a dogged, real world book, building up to one epic decision: the acceptance of the inevitable institutionalization of her husband.
What can you expect? Beauty and grit. Tough stuff for the loss of the relationship and the person, beautiful in the observation, in the specificity. A blown kiss, a cashed check, a walk: little moments are triumphs for George. It’s the others who get the losses: “Tears for our son Jonathan, who was effectively fatherless from the age of thirteen.” And you who get the benefit: Rachel Hadas has done the homework, she has a great deal of knowledge about the disease, and she generously shares it all.
And then there’s this: The poet writes laser prose. The start of a chapter says it all:
What year did you get married?"
A gray December morning, 2004. George and I are sitting side by side, facing his new doctor across the desk. The internist Dr. L, a fresh-faced man with prematurely white hair, seems somehow able to simultaneously look us both in the eye, ask George questions, and type into his computer. I have accompanied George — brought him here, really — and asked to come into the doctor’s office with him. Did I already know that he wouldn’t be able to navigate by himself — navigate getting to a new place, navigate the history, navigate the Q and A?
George hesitates. At what point (I ask myself now) did I get so accustomed to his hesitant speech, as if he’s rummaging around for reluctant answers? Exactly when did I get used to answering for him? And how could I have assumed for so long that in the fast-paced back and forth of the classroom, he must somehow be functioning just fine, although at home he barely spoke? All such assumptions, flimsy but stubborn, had collapsed like a house of cards the week before, when George’s chair at the Columbia music department telephoned me in the middle of the day and the whole story came out — missed appointments, puzzled and frustrated students lining up to complain.
"He can’t teach," she said. I was appalled — she and I both cried on the phone — but I was not surprised. A doctor had to be found to sign off on a medical leave. So here we are.
George hasn’t yet answered Dr. L’s question. Asking what year we were married is, I suppose, part of taking a history. Or is it more like a memory test? Or maybe both? At some point in the silence, I reluctantly recognize that, whatever the reason for this question, George has no idea of the answer.
A few snowflakes tumble lazily through the slice of gray sky I can glimpse out the window behind Dr. L. On the wall behind his computer are photographs of his family: laughing boys, a pretty woman, a dog. I drink some water. I’m not thirsty. Hot coffee would taste a lot better than cold water, but the bottle of water keeps me busy. I fold my hands around it and look down, or raise it to my lips to plug myself up. Clearly, I am not supposed to supply the answer to this question.
"1990?" George says, with a rising inflection that turns the answer into a guess.
I no longer remember precisely what happened next. Did I look at him? Did the doctor look at me? I know I went on clutching my water bottle like a talisman. I don’t think I said in so many words — to either of those tall, handsome men, the one across the desk typing and the one next to me, the one to whom I’d been married since 1978 — that 1990 was not the answer.
I do remember that rising inside me during this whole long, long appointment was a feeling it is a little too melodramatic to call panic. It was, rather, a sharply etched loneliness — a loneliness that stepped out from the shadows to which I had so far consigned it right onto center stage. There was also a queasy sense of shifting: shifting of power, of paradigms, of alliances, of allegiances. The center wasn’t holding, and I was in the process, as I hung on to my clammy water bottle for dear life, of casting about for a new center. In all this there was alarm and fear, but really, as I now recall it, no surprise.
Two other bits of the Q and A stick with me from that first morning when I fully entered the world of what I had not yet learned to call "dementia." At some point in the history, or interview, or interrogation, Dr. L asked George to take what I now know is a standard memory quiz: remember three words for ten minutes or so. I can still repeat them: dog, pencil, car. George remembered none of them.
Toward the end of the session, Dr. L asked George about his hobbies, what he did for fun. Tennis, chess, and reading, came the answer. With a chill that had already become familiar, I realized that George no longer played chess, barely read, and for the past few summers had played tennis only when I or our son spent an hour on the court with him in Vermont.
Soon, very soon, I would learn (although for several years I still lapsed occasionally) not to share my thoughts about my husband with my husband. But that morning, when the appointment was finally over and the prescriptions and referrals were in my bag, when we were once more in the corridor outside the doctor’s office, I thoughtlessly turned to George and said, "you know, what you said to the doctor about your hobbies — you don’t really play tennis or chess or read much any more, so it wasn’t really accurate."
Why would I say something so hurtful? Because for twenty-five years I had been used to sharing my thoughts with him; because I still habitually turned to him as a reality check, hoping he’d be able to comfort me, to brush away my silly misgivings. Because I desperately wanted to be reassured, and for years he had been pretty good at reassuring me. I was behaving as if he knew the truth of his own condition and as if that truth was, as he said to the neurologist we saw a few weeks later, that he was functioning at ninety percent of capacity. But what I blurted out was wounding, and he blamed the messenger.
All I remember of his response are the four words "you make me angry."
