My Wife Doesn't Remember Our Wedding, But She Remembers How to Hold Hands

I was a construction foreman for thirty-two years. I know how to read a blueprint, run a crew, and yell loud enough to be heard over a jackhammer. I do not know how to be soft. Or I didn't, until Evelyn started fading.

She was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's at sixty-one. She's sixty-four now. She doesn't always know who I am — some days I'm her husband, some days I'm 'that nice man who helps me,' some days I'm a stranger she tolerates with the politeness she'd give anyone. The woman who could quote entire scenes from old movies can't remember what she had for lunch. But when I take her hand, her fingers curl around mine exactly the way they did on our first date in 1984. That muscle memory is still there, underneath everything the disease has taken.

The hardest part isn't the caregiving — the bathing, the feeding, the medication management. It's the way the world sees me now. Men my age are supposed to be retiring, golfing, enjoying the fruits of a lifetime of labor. I'm buying my wife a stuffed rabbit because it's the only thing that calms her down when she's agitated. I'm sitting on the floor with her building block towers that she knocks over with delight. I'm learning a kind of softness I was never taught, at an age when most men have calcified into whatever version of masculinity they settled on in their thirties. Some of my old crew would laugh if they saw me now. Let them. They don't know what strength actually looks like. It looks like coloring inside the lines so your wife can feel proud of the picture.

I wish someone had told me, at the beginning, that it was okay to play. That the toys weren't a surrender. That the softness wasn't weakness. That you could be a man and a caregiver and a playmate all at once, and none of those roles cancelled out the others. I had to learn it alone. But I did learn it. And the man who can color with his wife without embarrassment is, I think, a better man than the one who could read blueprints.

— A reader of The Unadulting Society

About The Unadulting Society

The Unadulting Society is a collective of writers, advocates, and lived-experience experts exploring what adulthood looks like when you reject the milestone factory and build a life that actually fits. We publish community voices alongside our regular contributors. If you have a story to share, we'd love to hear from you.