This has nothing to do with the 2005 film or Bunny Mellon, lest anyone be gripped by curiosity or fear.
For nine days in a row I’ve felt like Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin at the end of All of Me, practically gliding on air.* I’m speaking figuratively, of course, and am mostly referring to how easy it’s been to think, to write, and to feel hopeful about the future. If, through the vagaries of timing, you’ve read these recent posts after they’ve been properly (rather than sleepily) edited, you might have noticed it, too: I’ve sounded like myself again lately. Knock wood the streak continues.
The way Crankenstein and I always figured it pre-Parkinson’s, she would lose her mind one day to what stalks it from the shadows, and I would lose what remains of my body to some combination of arthritis and Crohn’s. A physical decline, while inconvenient, wouldn’t be the end of the world, because what I brought to the table was — hold your laughter — sanity.
Not long before we met, Crankenstein had an epiphany: the reason her previous relationships failed was that there was altogether too much craziness. There hadn’t been a gardener, only flowers.** Normally she wouldn’t have given me a second look; I possess none of the erotic allure of her favorite pinups, Helen Mirren and Martha Stewart. A larger impediment would’ve been that she was a relentless overachiever who expected the same of her partners.
“Is she literate? Does she bathe?” I imagined her snobbier friends (mostly church elders) asking about me in the earliest days of our relationship. They might’ve pictured the titular character from Nell, or a starving migrant from a Dorothea Lange photograph. But what I lacked in Ivy League credentials, I made up for in stability. Crankenstein describes me as her impulse control, her “human Ritalin,” and as the gardener of our relationship, which has (mostly) replaced self-destructive behaviors as the chief calming agent in her life.
There’s more I could, and should, write about this when I have adequate time, but on days when my thoughts are as frozen as my movement I worry more about her future than mine. Who will take care of her if I can’t? The nicest thing about this past week of having my brain back (even as my body flounders) is that I’m not constantly aware of the dread, guilt and despair surrounding that question.
“I can take care of you,” she will say when she reads this, and I know how desperately she wants that to be true. “I take care of patients all day!” might be next, but we both know that’s something completely different; away from work, she isn’t much of a gardener.
* I’m not keeping track; I had to consult the LEGO post to see when it began.
** Crankenstein subscribes to the flower/gardener relationship theory, which is pretty self-explanatory.