I’ve walked the streets of small towns, big cities, beaches, exotic continents, parks and neighborhoods, all alone. I’ve made most decisions big and small alone. I’ve trod the hardest trails alone: father’s death; mother’s deterioration; divorce; child’s illness; career dissatisfaction. I didn’t know what to say when asked by the partners and friends I’d kept at the periphery. Even I didn’t see the invisible barrier.

I wouldn’t call myself a loner. I have pockets of people: new friends to make; old friends to catch up on; and calendared gatherings. But I’m just fine alone—even in a movie theater—that most forbidding of lone adventures.

Some came closer, spun out, and hated the not-knowing and shifting priorities. Some would have been there for me had I let them. And some got through and took a bit of the strain from my tired bones.

You might not have noticed just how alone I am. After all, I lived well-loved with my parents for eighteen years. I spent thirty years as part of one couple or another. But coupling can be so isolating. At its worst, it steals the generous mantle of solitude and replaces it with missed-opportunity.

In unconnected hours face-to-face, drenched in the ice-water of failed intimacy, alone finally becomes loneliness. My strong right-side withered under worm-eaten embraces, preoccupied hearts, and habitual sex. The unearthly weight of sadness, the black weight of doubt, the sharp stones of anxiety, sent me sprained and sprawling atop the original ruin.

You might not know it’s ok to be alone. But alone stands on two strong legs. Feet may tire, shoulders ache, and breath rasp, but the slow stride uphill can continue almost indefinitely, alone.

I knew she had to be so convenient to everything that rain simply couldn’t be an excuse to stay home. She walked to university classes and lectures, enjoyed the symphony season, looked forward to monthly breakfasts at the art museum, tutored in a neighborhood high school, baby sat for her granddaughter, read countless spy novels and became a part of my normal life and the lives of my friends, who would give her a lift home after gatherings at my house.

She knew lots of faces in her building and had lobby, pool and elevator chats. But she didn’t make real friends. Maybe that wasn’t odd–Mom wasn’t the girlfriend-type. If she needed to talk to someone, she struck up a conversation with whoever sat next to her. And boy, could she talk.

The talking had become more intense and less attached to subject. It was as if someone inserted a random tape and pushed play. There was no pause button, no chance to get a word, thought or prompt in edgewise. Her stories took over. Not the interesting stories people might have wanted to hear say, about New York during the war, or reuniting her family or moving them all to Texas. She gave lots of reports about my childhood and the wonderful produce men at the Safeway. My friends kindly took their turns being waylaid by her at a party.

I threw Mom the best eightieth birthday party I could dream up. I invited all the people she knew in the buildings and most of my friends. I decorated the party room and we had elegant flowers, champagne, lots of shrimp and a beautiful chocolate cake. When she blew out her candles, half her brain cells left her. At least it seemed like that’s when it all began.

Maybe the incessant and random way she talked was a hint things weren’t quite normal. That, and the dressing incident. Just days before her party, I had Thanksgiving at my house. Mom was in charge of the dressing—a specialty of hers. When I came to pick her up, the apartment didn’t smell like cooking. Mom had a plate of little stuffing squares ready. I was horrified. She showed me the box and affirmed they really were that easy to make and delicious.

I assumed something must have gone very wrong with her initial batch of dressing, although there was no burnt dressing in the garbage and no smell of it in the air. My head was squeezed between my expectations for my holiday table and this indicator of my Mom’s well-being. I helped her pack up the squares and her various bags and we went to my house for a dressing-less Thanksgiving.

The next major incident happened when we went to our accountant during tax season. Mom didn’t like the financial record keeping that fell to her as a widow, but she understood money and investing and accomplished it all with routine complaining. I took those complaints as a sign that things were normal.

The morning of the appointment, I called to say I’d be a little early so we could do an errand on the way to the accountant’s. She sounded distant and shaken.

“I can’t find the stuff for the accountant. “

Not to worry, I’ll come right over. I was sure it would just take some fresh eyes. She had probably set the stuff down in an odd place, or maybe draped her coat over it by accident.

“What are we looking for, Mom? An envelope? A brick file? A shoebox?”

She didn’t know.

Her financial records were shoved into the usual accumulators, but they hadn’t been opened, summarized or organized. I couldn’t tell if the quarterly tax payments had been made. She’d done nothing to get ready for this appointment. There was no pile under a coat or anywhere else.

The next alarming incident happened later on that spring, when I noticed that she had some new decorative items in her apartment one day. There was a plastic table and chairs for her patio, a large ugly tapestry for me, and some really tacky vases. Mom had collected fine bone china for years.

“Mom, where did these come from? “

“Oh, that lady was having a sale—she was moving with her boyfriend.”

Mom made it sound like she had bought one item but then the sellers kept bringing stuff over that they couldn’t get rid of. I discovered objects in other rooms; items with crosses on them were especially suspect. I checked on her jewelry and silver—they were there. How much cash could she have had?

Suddenly Mom was missing our dates, even if I called to remind her a couple of hours before. The first time it happened, I drove right to the nearby “psycho” Safeway. My blood pressure soared as I wove through the druggies and winos in the parking lot. There she was, in her produce temple, where the nice men kept the neighborhood ladies in trim, along with the fruit and vegetables. My Mother appreciated their care and now, so did I.

Mom and I talked on and off about memory and forgetfulness. She would say, “We all have that. It’s annoying, but it’s not a problem yet. I’d let you know.”

She had her answers down pat.

The symphony season turned into a challenge. All her dates were written on her calendar but what reminds you to look at the calendar? What reminds you to look at the note to remind you to look at the calendar? I took on that job. Once I started, the bottom dropped out and the symphony was the least of my concerns.

Meds: some of them have to be taken in the morning; some in the evening, some both. Fortunately, Mom didn’t have any really brittle conditions. I started with one of those day by day pill boxes. We got it all set up and made a special place for it—where she couldn’t help but notice it first thing every morning. Great, that was fixed.

Not so fast. If you don’t remember whether you took your meds, you also might not remember it’s Monday. So the fact that Monday’s pills were gone didn’t faze Mom—she’d take another day’s pills.

Ok—we can talk pills on the phone each day. That meets some social needs and takes care of the meds all at once. But again—five minutes after the phone call, she might go back to that pill box and decide she hadn’t taken her pills that day, whatever the name of it might be. I couldn’t believe she didn’t remember a half-hour phone conversation that featured pill taking as its major theme at least three different times. I also couldn’t believe I couldn’t get her to follow along with me on the phone.

“OK Mom, get a glass of water. Get the pills out from today’s section. You got them? Great. Now swallow them, right now, ok? I’ll wait. Did you take them all? Great, now put the box back on the sideboard and you’re done with that.”

Who knew what she was really doing. Taking them? Not taking them? Taking them again? Or not again? Yes. But the real problem was always getting bigger and more significant as I was chasing the last symptom.

I could go over there and bring her pills each day. Then she couldn’t double down. Would I have to go back in the evening for the eye drops? She seemed to be pretty good about those. She’d taken them for years. But again—what did I really know?

She began to warehouse chicken breasts. The psycho Safeway was her recreation center. Each time she went, she must have bought the same things. But she wasn’t really eating. She was losing weight and the freezer was filling up. When we came for dinner, we saw her forget that the fish was broiling. Was she distracted by company? Or was this usual? The whole situation needed to be changed, and pretty quickly.

She was undergoing testing with a geriatric psychologist. “Alzheimer’s,” he said. Not mild mind you. She was already experiencing what he described as some middle-level of dementia. Mom talked her way right through the diagnosis session with the psychologist. She let nothing in. He was quiet and careful, bringing her back around to discuss the disease and the future and her needs but she avoided it.

I knew I would have to break through by raising the housing issue. I wasn’t afraid to pose the idea of Assisted Living and I was lucky, Mom was quite receptive. She had been interested in the rise of these new facilities and levels of care; she had friends who had moved into places.

I would scout the places first, sample the administration, the smells, the opportunities and the official reports. “Yes, the vaulted ceiling over the dining room creates lovely light and space. But the morning bacon grease just hangs there.” Bathrooms—yuch. Managers with polyester ties—it shouldn’t matter, but it does. I brought Mom to see the best choice.

Everything was lovely—light and airy. Happy old people worked at clay and conversation. Meals could be flexible. The food was pretty real, the dining rooms lovely, smells in check, meds administered and ties were made of silk. Everything about it seemed quite good, and they had a place available.

“This studio won’t last, you know. Are you ready to make a decision?” Into the pressure cooker.

“Yes, we’ll take it.”

I got boxes and told Mom I’ll come pack. I didn’t want her to aggravate her back. I wanted her to have the things she enjoyed: her china beauties and photo albums and her special pieces of furniture. But I couldn’t get her to leave the stuff alone. I unpacked her packing and repacked. I made boxes inaccessible so she wouldn’t unpack them. Together we made her hallway practically impassible. Finally, the two bedroom, two bath apartment that was too, too full of her things was shoehorned into a spacious studio. Her new home was really very nice.

I hadn’t anticipated that with the move, another huge chunk of brain cells would be left behind completely, including my Mother’s sense of order. She would look for underwear in a bathroom drawer or a kitchen cabinet just as soon as she would look in her dresser drawer, even though it was the same dresser she used in the apartment. She could meander around the facility and chance into meals and companionship. I could find her. But she couldn’t seem to get to the nice classes or to the laundry right across the hall from her studio.

Her ability to function had been a moth-eaten veil and when she stepped out of her apartment building–poof–a tiny gust of air blew it to bits. It was gone forever with nothing to replace it, nothing to cover her confusion and nothing to stabilize the continuing erosion.

After a bit, she couldn’t stay in her room at night. Calls came. “Your mother wants to call a cab. She says she wants to leave. Your mother is arguing. Your mother is agitated. Would you talk to your mother about this? “

The administration found her agitation very inconvenient, a sign that her condition was worsening. I finally had to tell the manager “That passive nice-little-old-lady who sits around the dining room all spaced out—that’s someone I never met before. That difficult woman you call me about—that’s the last shred of my Mother.”

0ne call told me that Mom apparently fell in her room and turned her china cabinet over. Fortunately she hadn’t hurt herself. Her fragile treasures lay in mountains of treacherous shards. By the time I got there, the huge volume of tiny pieces had been swept away. I combed through the larger chunks to see what remained; I set up the odd cup, the spared saucer, here and there.

Mom was suitably relieved that she wasn’t hurt. She wasn’t despondent about losing her well-tended collection of china and memories. She had left people and things before. She knew what was important. But her new frame of no-mind added too much distance. The memories linked to those pieces were simply gone, not mourned at all, not even with her usual tough wistfulness.

I began to brace myself before answering my phone. “What trouble is she in now?” It turns out plenty. One day she walked out the front door and I was told to move her within the week.

I scrambled to move her into yet a smaller place with more care: a lockdown. It sounded terrible, but once I had her surrounded by other dementia patients, the hole suited the peg. She was no longer a staff problem but, rather, a staff favorite. She turned her annoying judgments based on people’s looks and clothes into a non-stop stream of compliments to the female staff. This helped her. Repetitive compliments were easier to take than the abuse and belligerency some patients dished out.

All through the declining years I was amazed at what stayed, what went, and when. I had heard about short term and long term memory but that didn’t mean much after the diagnosis came. At first, it troubled me that she’d forget that my father, her mate of thirty-nine years, was dead. She seemed to think he went off someplace and callously neglected to write. I didn’t want her to feel abandoned. I didn’t want her to live with resentment that his dead sisters never called because they really never liked her. But I couldn’t get through.

I would take her to the nearby grocery to walk and see how life still operated around her. One spring day, the store had an end-cap display of Passover products. She stared blankly. Then she reached for a tin of Matzo meal. Neither of us had seen Matzo meal in a tin before. She held it aloft admiringly and said “This is great. Why didn’t we have this years ago.” I saw Laura for a moment–something was still working in there.

We had occasional crises, usually over lost teeth and glasses. But mostly it was one long downward slide after she fell off those first two cliffs: the birthday and moving out of her apartment. When people would ask about her I always reported that she was good from the neck down.

Finally in March of last year the end came. She was sent into the emergency room after a caregiver noticed she was less responsive than usual. Her body unwound for three days of gentle hospice care. I chose not to move her back to her home–it seemed unnecessarily disruptive. I sat with her and we waited. I think it was reasonably good for us both.

Once again I visit that stumbling, paved, too-crowded, terrain. The air is heavy with my beautiful romance. My heart longs for him, for that connection. Quickly, I shift into reality mode. No, I’m done with criticism.

I didn’t feel this longing when my marriage split apart. Yes, I sought every bit of flesh we could muster together, to tide me over the summer months. A long marriage stocks sex like a bait shop stocks lures. Let’s just say it was the last marital commodity to lose its charm.

In those days, my body’s insistent desire came from the fear of alone-ness: am I undesired and undesirable? But longing, no–not longing. All the love and affection seemed dried up and blown away. After all those futile attempts to make the marriage work there was no more fantasy left.

Fantasy is a huge part of romance: a good, growing, expanding part—necessary. But, it can get out hand. Somewhere along the line, that last romance took a breakneck gallop to fantasy land. It was spurred on by the thousand miles of distance between us. When I longed for reassurance I could revisit any one of a dozen favorite emails. When I craved his hands across my body I could relive a favorite encounter. More and more the fantasy man replaced the real and infrequent lover. Reality could disappoint and fantasy never does; he became his own rival.

And now, months after the end, standing here in his town, my world becomes tumbled with love, lust and longing. I feel it grab hold of me again, pulling me under in breathless distraction. The fantasy life I dreamed with my lover? Gone. Tender anniversaries linger. Off balance like this, I might regret the break-up and give my heart away again. It’s such a bad habit, but so familiar.

I’m old enough to know that love can end. I know that happiness is what I give to myself. I seek ground to stop this restless earth from spilling me on my side. Stepping onto the airplane helps me shake away the dream-shards and drive longing back underground, so I can catch myself and balance on my heart.