1 week Ago By Sue Dickman
People told me to put my husband in an assisted living facility. Here’s why I didn’t. In the months after my partner, Alex, was diagnosed with dementia in 2019, more than one person advised me to “save” myself.
What they meant was that I should move Alex into an assisted-living facility and get on with my life. It wasn’t an unreasonable suggestion. Alex was 23 years older than me - 75 to my 52.
Although we had been in a relationship for 18 years, we had lived together for less than a year. We were not married. He had two adult daughters.
It didn’t have to be me. And yet, I never seriously considered it. Alex’s diagnosis followed months of realising more and more urgently that something was seriously wrong.
It was as if we had entered a tunnel in which the only exits were into doctor’s offices for tests and scans and increasingly concerned conversations. Along with the diagnosis, Alex was told he had to immediately stop driving and retire from his job as a therapist. We were thrust into a world of new doctors, unfamiliar terminology and multiple layers of bureaucracy.
It required skill and smarts to navigate, qualities Alex no longer possessed. I didn’t have time to plan an escape route. But also, my longtime partner had just received a devastating diagnosis.
I couldn’t imagine racing to find a way out. What I imagined instead was going to visit him at a facility, and Alex asking when he could come home to me and our cats. I imagined facing this day after day after day.
It hadn’t even happened yet, and already I couldn’t bear it. That was what it came down to: what I thought I could bear versus what I couldn’t. Besides, even if I had wanted to find somewhere else for him to live, Alex had no money.
His younger self had always opted for the adventurous or interesting over the stable or lucrative. By the time we met, he had settled into a later-in-life career as a therapist and social worker. Eventually, he would qualify for Medicaid, but that turned out to be elusive.
To be eligible for the programmes that offered assistance at home , Alex had to qualify clinically as well as financially. This meant he had to need help with the most basic elements of everyday life - things like bathing and dressing. For a long time, he was able to manage these himself.
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