Ch. 52 Ending our Book on a Positive Note.. and Starting Another.
December, 2019
Pat and I began this dialogue just over a year ago. Many of these last 365-plus days went well; a few have gone very badly; most days have been a mixture of good and bad. The same can be said of the presence of Lewy Body symptoms; sometimes they are virtually absent; occasionally they cause great confusion and alarm; mostly they are there moderately affecting our daily activities.
Yesterday, though, was a wonderful day. Pat and I baked and frosted a cake together. We watched an excellent Broadway performance of The King and I on PBS. We read and thoroughly discussed a dialogue entry before entering it onto our Lewy Body Dialogue blog site. We even took a long early winter drive through the beautiful hills around our western Wisconsin home. We made love.
We had set a goal of creating fifty chapters of our dialogue before exploring the possibility of publishing them as a book. We’ve now surpassed that goal. In the meantime, we created our blog; in it we are publishing one chapter a week. Rereading these chapters makes me grateful that we’ve gone over a year without Pat becoming debilitated by her disease. It also helps me realize that we are still dealing with some of the same issues mentioned a year ago such as my tendency to overcontrol in the name of protecting Pat.
We plan to keep writing our dialogue. It’s been too good for us to end it. I’ve discovered repeatedly that Pat has excellent thoughts about her situation, our relationship, and Lewy Body Dementia as a part of our lives. I think my writing has helped Pat understand better what it feels like to be her care partner.
I want to recommend shared journaling to those of you who as a couple are sharing the Lewy Body journey. Please give it a try. If you do, you may find it to be a rewarding and enlightening experience.
Pat’s comments on Ending on a Positive Note
A rewarding and enlightening experience, yes, as long as we talked about it first.
Writing the journal has helped me put my life together and it has helped me understand that some things are wonderful and a little wrenching at the same time.
Added Note, October 2020. We have indeed continued composing our journal through this date. Please plan to keep reading our new entries that we will post weekly. The next one starts what might become the second volume of our Lewy Body Dialogue book if we can keep collaborating another year or so.