Love in the time of dementia

The story in the NYT's Week in Review begins thusly: "So this, in the end, is what love is."

The story is about love and age, and begins with the example of Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman named to the US supreme court, and her husband who suffers from Alzheimer's. He is in a nursing home and has fallen for someone else, and Sandra is pleased. The O'Connor's son reports that his mom is happy to see her husband of 55 years happy and content, and even visits the new couple, chit-chatting with them as they hold hands on a porch swing.

New love, the story goes on to say, is all about the thrill of it all and wanting to be happy. Old love apparently is about softer things and wanting someone else to be happy.

There is even a claim in the piece that as the brain ages (that means, as we age) we become easier to please, more inclined to see the good over the bad, better able to deal with the vicissitudes of love. Studies guaging reactions to positive and negative scenes indicate that young people react to the negative, middle aged people see a balance and the elderly respond only to the positive. As people get older, therefore, they seem to naturally see the world in a more positive light.

Oh my, there is so much to say about all this.

First of all, where are these studies and what lobotomized old people did they find to do them with? I have worked in many a nursing home including those filled with Alzheimer's sufferers and other demented souls and I can tell you, the elderly are often deeply crabby to the point of pure evil. It may be sunny and lovely outside and everyone may be perfectly pleasant but by god, you should have understood that the mushy squash goes on the LEFT side of the plate.

The O'Connor "love" story strikes me in a few ways as well, and few are positive. First of all, and this is an idee fixe of mine, it is definitely a man's world. Here we have a demented old man in a nursing home and he can still find a date. There is no mention of the brilliant, talented and accomplished Sandra having same; in my own case we have an imperfectly sane bombshell sitting at home alone on a Saturday night. Ms O'Connor, WHERE is the justice in all this? This story strikes me as being painfully close to that of Stephen Hawking's sorry love life -- wherein we have a man who is virtually helpless and has had to depend on his good wife for absolutely everything including the messy bits having to do with bottoms; he is a man who is undoubtedly weird, certainly weird to talk to with that manufactured computer voice and all, and yet he still is able to run off (though "run" may not be the word) with the nanny, his own nanny but nevertheless. He may be twisted to gnome proportions and impossible to understand but by god and by gar, he still has romantic options.

If this sounds like the twisted gnomes of the world don't deserve love, forgive me. Of course that is not what I mean. It is that no matter what, MEN are still considered sexy and attractive, a "catch", long past the point where a woman is. Why can't the world love an adventurous woman is it does and adventurous man?

In my next life, please let me be a man. And if yes, may I not be born into the time of Amazons? I want just once to feel what it's like to be a winner.

What the studies and the article seem to suggest is that as we grow older we grow wearier of the fight for that elusive happiness of being loved absolutely by someone we love absolutely. We grow accustomed to compromise, to infidelity, to the let-down -- a crumb is okay, at least it's something.

Perhaps this beats abject heartbreak at 80. Heartbreak today nearly kills me, I don't know if I could withstand such a thing with a frailer heart than the one I have now. Perhaps this general giving in is simply biology -- the body's desire to survive where the heart and mind would not.