Ambiguous Loss, Real Loss, and a Sexy Motorcycle

​When I met the man who later became my husband, he had a 1956 Triumph motorcycle disassembled in his bedroom.  I thought that was sexy. Sexy because it suggested that he was smart.  He had taken the motorcycle apart to fix it, and I figured he would likely be able to put it back together.  This, along with the fact that he was a knockout handsome hippy, sold me on him as a boyfriend and lover.
            48 years later, I held his hand as he died at home of vascular dementia that had transmuted into Alzheimer’s Disease, a disease that, in his case, first attacked the hippocampus and then all the brain’s lobes.  It ravages a person’s short and long-term memories, but also, more tragically, erodes the person’s ability to think, to process, to problem solve.  In the last few years of my handsome hippy’s life, he didn’t even know how to use a screwdriver let alone know the difference between a carburetor and a throttle and where they belonged on an assembled motorcycle.  That motorcycle that he took apart and put together would have been a baffling mystery to him.  The guy who knew how to do anything or who could figure out how to do anything no longer existed.  He was a body absent an intact problem-solving mind.
            As a nascent widow, I’m trying to process and come to terms with what is termed ambiguous grief along with the real thing.  It’s called ambiguous because the person is still physically alive, but they are not the same person because their mind is eroding.  And I’ve been wondering about my husband’s own encounter with grief.  Did he experience all five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) or was he allowed to avoid the profound sorrow that accompanies losing his essential faculties, those faculties that helped him eventually excel as a math wizard and as a professor of Computer Science?  How does one come to terms with losing one’s mind?  Is it even possible?  And how does the spouse who witnesses this loss dig her way out of the morass of the limbo grief that became real along with the knowledge that the brilliant motorcycle-riding hippy, who taught others how to think, will never return, neither in a debilitated state nor in a coherent, resurrected state?  These are the questions that haunt my psyche and ones I will try to answer.
 
I’ve been grieving for eight years.  First in limbo and now in stark, brutal reality.  When you read about dementia, most of what you read and are counseled about is how to manage the devastating changes in your loved one, how to deal with their loss of autonomy, but also the importance of taking care of yourself.  No one really addresses the limbo grief, other than mentioning it.  No authority suggests ways to deal with it, to assuage it, to conquer it because it’s neither one thing nor another; it’s ambiguous.