GREAT MINDS and all that.
I’ve not met John Wilson, who lives in central Texas, but we are brought close by loss.
When my wife Connie first started down the dementia path Pam Turner, a good friend in Huntsville, Texas, told me I needed to read a book by this John Wilson guy about his experiences with a wife suffering from frontal temporal dementia. I did and we communicate, friended each other on Facebook. John’s wife passed a few years ago but he still writes a blog and it’s a daily read for me.
This morning he wrote about making some changes to his house. He lives alone now and he is repurposing some rooms, sprucing things up. He recounted the house as it was when his wife was alive and it was a hub for family. Family still comes but it’s different now that he’s living alone.
“The house will reflect the changes in my life, and become a new source of life for me, and my family, and friends,” he wrote.
I don’t have a house. We gave up house-living back in March of 2021 when we left Texas for West Chester, PA to be nearer our son. We settled into a two-bedroom apartment and life was good despite Covid still lingering. We didn’t know dementia had snuck up Connie. She entered memory care in January of 2024 and in May I moved from out two-bedroom unit to a one-bedroom place in the same complex.
When I moved I more or less threw stuff into the new unit. It was a place to be without Connie, though I told people we still lived together, it was just that her bedroom was seven blocks away.
But she’s dying. Hospice says to expect it death to come in the next 24 hours. This past week I had a painter come in. I moved all the furniture to the middle of the rooms and added some color. Bright orange on one wall, a softer orange on the facing wall in both the living and bedrooms, yellow gold in the small bathroom. Why orange? When our daughter lived in Mexico City and we visited I loved the vibrancy of the colors inside and out.
I decided I wanted color. I also wanted to open the living room up a bit so put the furniture back in different places. Hung the paintings in different places.
Like John I’ve been through changes and a big one is coming. How I lived before won’t be how I will live in the future. After three years of living with death hovering in the corner, I want life. I want color. Like John said, “a new source of life.”
Orange and yellow gold.
Rich Heiland is a retired journalist and semi-retired consultant, trainer and public speaker. During his journalism career he was a reporter, editor, publisher, college instructor, part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team and a National Newspaper Association Columnist of the Year honoree. He lives in West Chester, PA and can be reached at [email protected].