The man I married built our deck with his own hands. He was an engineer — the kind who could look at a problem and see the solution before anyone else had finished describing it. He was sharp, impatient, brilliant, and sometimes a little cold. I loved him anyway. I still love him. But the man who came home from the hospital after his stroke was not that man.
This new man cries at commercials. He needs help cutting his food. He has a stuffed bear he sleeps with and a coloring book he works on every afternoon, his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth in concentration. The first time I saw him coloring — really saw him, this grown man with gray in his beard, carefully choosing between blue and green for a picture of a whale — I had to leave the room. Not because I was ashamed. Because I was standing face to face with the gap between who I married and who I'm married to now, and the gap was wide enough to fall into.
People ask me how I'm doing. I tell them I'm fine. What I want to say is: I'm grieving a man who's still alive. I'm learning to love someone new who lives in my husband's body. I'm coloring with a grown man and pretending it's normal when nothing about this is normal. And also — and this is the part that confuses me most — I'm happier than I've been in years. Not because the stroke was a gift. It wasn't. It was a catastrophe. But the man who came back is gentler. He's present in a way he never was before. He notices things — the way light hits the kitchen table, the sound of rain, the feel of my hand in his. He can't solve engineering problems anymore. But he holds my hand in a way the old version of him never did: fully, completely, without one eye on the next thing. I miss the man I married. And I love the man I'm married to now. Both of those things are true. Neither one cancels the other.
— 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 about reclamation, loss, or the strange ways love adapts, we'd love to hear from you.
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Download: Spousal Caregiver Survival Guide
Loving them and grieving the old us, at the same time, is not a contradiction. If you're a spousal caregiver, you already know the specific loneliness of this: the person you'd normally turn to is the person you're now caring for.
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