“But who’s Chico?” he asked with a blank look on his face. That was the first really telling sign. Of course, he was forgetting things, but we all do that. However, there is a difference between having too many things on your mind and having dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. But here was a clear sign. We had watched Marx brothers films for years. At first, we would quote to one another in various situations, “Chico would say, ‘That’s a no good.’” Then we shortened it to, “You know what Chico would say.” It had been one of the private codes we had developed over decades of marriage, a bonding phrase. So when he couldn’t remember who Chico was, I knew it was not just average, busy-minded forgetfulness. It was time for a diagnosis and to see what kind of help we could get. For me, that was also the beginning of grief.

I would be losing my partner. He would become, bit by bit, a stranger to me. Not for many years, I hoped. I grieved for my loss. But I also grieved for him. He was always more of a thinker than a doer. A philosopher, a theologian, a talker. Dementia had always been his greatest fear. As English was his fourth language, he didn’t always immediately understand every conversation. He sometimes needed to have something rephrased to clarify. Nevertheless, he was a deep and profound thinker.

On the ALZconnected forum for spouses of people with dementia, I read a post about seeking anticipatory grief counseling. Initially, that sounded like an excellent thing to pursue. In a book about grief I had picked up from a table of free books, I found two titles on anticipatory grief in the appendix. Eagerly, I checked them out from the library. I discovered that both were memoirs written by fairly young people dying of cancer. They were moving, but irrelevant to my needs. I needed something written from the perspective of the surviving spouse. I decided to write my own.

As I began writing, I realized that anticipatory grief is a misnomer. I am not anticipating. I am already grieving. I grieve a lifetime of regrets for things I could have done better. I grieve seeing bits of my husband dying, day by day, and I grieve each successive loss. So here is my journal of daily loss and grief, not at the beginning, but a discrete moment that we shall call the beginning. Grief in process.