Moral Hazard Read Free Page B

repeated the doctor’s words.
    You will think me cruel. I could have lied, gone along with the delusion, but my role in our marriage had always been to bring Bailey back to earth, be his ballast. Left to himself, Bailey became airborne with notions and grand plans. He flew in the face of facts. By sheer will, by wanting something to be so, he would
prevail.
    I cried for five days straight, until my eyes were swollen shut. A bill arrived from the doctor, and in the space provided for the diagnosis was written
dementia.
Pretty word, end-of-the-world word. The vocabulary of senility. Other words and phrases came to mind:
gaga
,
away with the pixies
,
lost his marbles
,
nobody home.
Knowing next to nothing about Alzheimer’s other than these cruel, dismissive tags, I went to Barnes and Noble on Eighty-sixth Street, pulled out all the books on the disease, and, sitting on one of those round rubber step stools, worked my way through them, hysteria rising until I thought it would gush from me, gouts of it, like water from a fire hydrant.
    I learned the obvious: Without memory, we are nothing. I also learned that the disease wasn’t a slow slide, a long good-bye into nothingness, but more like descending in a malfunctioning, bumpy elevator into something approximating childhood. A childhood imagined by Goya or Buñuel. Or George Romero. Bailey would lose not just his memory of events and people but all his skills, from the most sophisticated to the elementary—from language to control over his bodily functions. He would forget how to swallow, walk backward when he wanted to go forward, become sexually “inappropriate.” Maybe not all of those things—the disease affects people differently, some pacing and cursing as if the hounds of hell were after them, others sinking into immobility and sweetness—but he would, as they all do, forget to remember. Bailey would erode like a sandstone statue, becoming formless and vague, reduced to a nub. This would take, oh, about seven years.

5
    A Greyhound bus out of town. Be gone. That would be an answer. After it was all over, in the middle of another winter, exhausted, cold to my bones, colder still in my heart, I thought about Greyhound buses again, buses heading to warm weather, to Miami, but worried that I would die, like Ratso in
Midnight Cowboy
, before I got there, in my own spreading puddle of pee.
    The doctor suggested I join a group for Alzheimer’s caregivers that a social worker from his neurology unit had started. (“Caretaker”—of a human shell—is more apt.) The day of the first meeting it snowed, and the streets filled with slush. Only two other women—dignified, Jewish, in their sixties—attended. We pulled our chairs up to a round table that was too big for so few, and the social worker asked if anything in particular was worrying us. We all shook our heads. To get the discussion going, she broached the subject of sex, although she referred to it as “intimacy.” The house of illness is papered with euphemisms.
    The first woman said, “He is my husband. He will always be my husband.”
    The second woman chewed on her lip, crumbled. “I can’t. He would like me to, but I can’t.” She started to cry, then gathered herself to say, “You know what I hate? When I’m dressing him, he holds his arms up so I can pull on his sweater. Just like a child.” She thrust her hands in the air to demonstrate. “I—don’t—want—a—child,” she said, hawking up the words, making them gobs of disgust.
    Attention shifted to me. I tried to retract my head into my body. A secretary knocked on the door, summoning the social worker to a phone call. While she was gone, the three of us attempted to chat.
    “How long has your husband had Alzheimer’s?” one asked.
    “Early days,” I said. “Only just diagnosed.”
    Silence.
    “I can’t bear this,” I blurted. “You’re describing our future.”
    “You shouldn’t be here. Not yet. Come later, when he’s more