My husband is gone and I don’t know when he left.

I don’t mean gone physically. He is still here, next to me in bed, snoring gently. The body is the same. It’s the person who inhabits the body that has vanished. For some reason I never realized that.

I still think of Jack as Jack. I still think of him as my husband. But I need to see him differently because he isn’t my husband now. I am viewing him through the lens of who he used to be. And that is hurting me.

My husband would never call me names like “bitch” or “c_nt”. Jack has done both. My husband would never accuse me of stealing his money, playing games, cheating on him, trying to make him crazy. Jack has done all of that. My husband wouldn’t sit there, expect me to wait on him hand and foot, and get mad when I didn’t do it fast enough. Jack has done that. My husband wouldn’t hit me. Jack has, twice (this was more than a year ago). It’s part of his dementia. I understand that.

Lately Jack has been saying how unhappy he is. He wants to go home, he says. He wants me to stop working and stay with him all the time. He doesn’t understand why I have to work so hard. I’m not moving fast enough to get us out of here.

He wants me to help him understand things. But lately, no matter how many times I explain or how many ways I try to explain, I’m not getting through. “You need to try harder.” Jack says at those times. “You’re supposed to help me!” He doesn’t understand why I can’t. He thinks I’m not trying hard enough.

For some reason, I never thought of these words as being part of his dementia. I thought of them as my husband’s words; therefore they were true. It was my fault that he was unhappy. I wasn’t doing enough fast enough to make things better.

I couldn’t make him understand. I felt guilty because he wasn’t getting it. He blamed me and I agreed. I wasn’t trying hard enough.

This ‘not doing enough’ was a weight on my shoulders for more months than I care to think about. I was constantly trying to figure out how to make it work. What else could I do? What new thing could I try to help him understand? How could I keep him busy and happy when I wasn’t there?

Tonight, reality whacked me upside the head. I was journalling, wondering what else I could try to make things better, and it hit me: I can’t. No matter what I do it won’t be enough. The dementia is going to progress no matter what I do or don’t do.

The hard truth is, I can’t help Jack understand because he is incapable of understanding. I haven’t failed him even though he sees it that way. The dementia won’t let him understand.

I am not the source of Jack’s unhappiness, even though he says I am. His own brain is, and he can’t control that. I can’t fix it, nor am I capable of fixing it. If I moved him somewhere else like he wants me to, he would still be the same person. Moving somewhere else will not fix Jack.

Jack is gone. I know that now. It is a hard truth to face. I don’t want to face it, especially since I still love him. But facing it will allow me to finally lay down the guilt that I haven’t done enough. The truth is, no matter what I do it won’t be enough.

This realization won’t stop me from trying my best. It won’t stop me from loving Jack, from giving him the best life I can. What it will do is remind me that I am not the person Jack sees. In truth, he doesn’t see me. What he sees is a projection of the dementia. And nothing I do can fix that.