Topic: Lost

Topic: Lost

I lost my husband in the summer of 2016.  He was actually slipping away from me before that in subtle ways, but it became obvious that something wasn’t right with him or with us that summer. First, he stopped bringing home any money.  He’d leave for work every day in his truck, presumably to work his business of sealing driveways.  We hadn’t been married long, just three years  at the time, but in the first three years of our marriage every week he’d come home  with a big wad of cash, anywhere from one to two thousand dollars during the busy season.  He’d present it to me proudly, and I’d deposit it into our joint account and made sure all the bills got paid.  That summer week after week I’d ask if he had made any money and it was always some excuse like he had to pay Brandon or buy sealer or fix something on the truck.  It didn’t make any sense.  I’d come home from my work around 6 and he wouldn’t get home till after dark.  Was he really going to work? 

One night that summer it was after 11pm and he wasn’t answering his phone or responding to texts.  I called his work partner, Brandon, who said they had finished the job about 9 so he wasn’t sure where Jeff was.   I asked his partner if he had been acting strangely, and he confessed that Jeff had stopped helping on the jobs and seemed to have trouble keeping track of which job they were on.  When I told him Jeff hadn’t come home, Brandon went looking for him, and found him asleep in his truck at a truck stop near the job.  His phone was out of battery life and the truck was out of gas.  Jeff said he didn’t know what to do so he figured he would get some rest. 

I started to wonder if he was having an affair.  He seemed to have gradually lost interest in me, but I attributed it to his age, 63 at the time, and the fact that he had a physically stressful job that involved working in the hot son.  So one day when he was out in the yard I snatched his phone and looked for proof of infidelity.  Instead, I found multiple texts from unhappy customers-people who he had not followed up with, jobs started but not finished, and people threatening to sue him.  He didn’t have any money, because he wasn’t starting and/or finishing the jobs. 

He also lost interest in our friends and family.  During my nephews wedding reception he disappeared for over an hour.  Again, he didn’t respond to my calls or texts.  When he finally returned he told me it wasn’t a big deal, that he needed to buy a nail clipper and shouldn’t a man be able to trim his nails without being interrogated?! 

On the 4^th of July we went to a cookout at the home of close friends.  He left in the middle of the party without telling me and was gone for hours.  When he came back he refused to come inside.  I sat in the front seat begging him to come inside but he said these weren’t “his people” and he wanted to go home.   I got him to reluctantly agree to stay just till the fireworks were over, but he buried his face in his hands and said the fireworks were “so loud.”  We had gone to several fireworks displays when we were dating, and he loved them. 

I found him sitting on the roof one day after work.  It had enough of a slope to it that I feared he would fall off.  He said he needed to think. 

I was awakened at 3am to rustling in the back yard.  He was out there moving the yard equipment into some kind of pattern.  When I questioned him he bellowed, “I’m a man!  And I can do whatever I want!”

We had a cistern for our water supply and periodically we’d pay about seventy dollars to have it filled with fresh water.  He started “saving” water in the basement in dozens of containers of varying sizes.  I explained that I didn’t want to reuse the water and that we could afford the seventy dollars but he would not be dissuaded and became angry when I dumped out all of his water when he was napping. 
He lost his empathy.  I told him that my father’s cancer had returned, that it had metastasized and he looked up from his video game long enough to say “bummer.” 

I feared he was going to get himself, get us, in legal trouble because he had lost his filter.  He told sexually inappropriate jokes to total strangers.  He came out into the front yard wearing nothing but boxer briefs and we had an eight year old girl living next door.  He told me I was being ridiculous when I suggested that the neighbors might be offended.   We were at a fancy restaurant and he started talking loudly to a young couple sitting across from us.  He invited these total strangers to come back to our house and hang out.  They were beyond uncomfortable and declined.  I caught the young woman’s eye and gave her an apologetic look and mouthed “I’m sorry” to her. 

The police called me one night to say, “We have your husband here.  He was wandering around the neighborhood and we had some complaints.  He says he’s out of gas and didn’t know what to do.”  I went to the station to pick him up.  He was about 45 minutes from home.  His cell phone had died.  He had locked his keys inside his van and he was out of gas.  He hadn’t brought his wallet or any money with him.   After that he agreed to go the doctor for an evaluation.  He finally admitted to me that something wasn’t right.  He had a plastic bag full of various chargers and cables with USB ports on them. He didn’t have his keys or his wallet but he had half a dozen chargers.  He gestured into the mass of tangled wires and said, “That’s what my head feels like.” 

The final diagnosis was frontotemporal dementia with behavioral disturbance.  It took months later till we officially learned that there was a name for all this bizarre behavior.  There was a name for what had taken my husband away from me.   It was a relief in some ways because I could stop blaming him for anything.  He couldn’t help all of this.  I was facing life with a confused often petulant boy who couldn’t really be left unsupervised anymore and the crazier thing was that he happened to look just like the man I had lost.