He still greets her, just the same.
“Hey, beautiful,” Dr. John Gardner says to his wife.
“Hey, handsome,” Emily Gardner says back.
For more than 10 years, John, 85, has watched Alzheimer’s clear Emily’s mind of more than 60 years of memories they’ve shared together.
But parts of Emily, 83, have hung on. For one, her love for him. For two, her love for their family.
“Sometimes I feel like I didn’t deserve Emily, but she seems to still love me the way she always has, so I’m a lucky guy,” he said.
Emily and John met on a blind date while students at the University of Oklahoma. John’s roommate was in Spanish class with Emily and set them up.
They were going to a party together, and John hadn’t seen Emily before he pulled up at home to pick her up.
“When I first saw her, I tell you, I thought, ‘This is a beautiful woman,’” he said. “And when I got to know her better, she was the one.”
After serving in the military, John worked as a physician, first as a family practice doctor and then as a radiologist. Emily was a stay-at-home mom, caring for the couple’s four children.
Their daughter Becky Roman, 56, goes to visit her mother every Monday night. They do puzzles together. It’s a family pastime.
Roman remembers countless 1,000-piece puzzles that she and her family completed with their mother. Once Emily bought Roman a 1,000-piece puzzle that was a picture of popcorn. That one was a challenge.
On Monday nights, Roman usually brings a 300-piece puzzle. She’s noticed that over time, she does more of the puzzle than her mom. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have a good time.
Sometimes they sing as they do the puzzles, sometimes with everyone else in the memory care unit joining in. Roman, the music minister at St. Mark’s United Methodist Church, might start them on a Christmas carol, especially if she can’t think of another song. Or maybe they’ll sing older songs, like “A Bushel and a Peck” or “Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two).”
“Even when she might be confused, I think she knows that I’m somebody she cares about, and that’s what really matters,” Roman said.
Emily’s caring nature hasn’t wavered. The family fondly remembers stories from their parents’ 14 mission trips to Central America and beyond.
John would provide medical care, and Emily was on line duty. She would stand with the people waiting, smiling at them, helping give them hope that medical care was coming for them.
Julie West, John and Emily’s youngest daughter, said this is one of the countless examples she remembers of her mother’s kindness.
West, a physician assistant in Kansas, said her mother instilled in her children and grandchildren the importance of kindness.
West misses being able to call her mom for advice. Emily thinks West’s children and her other grandchildren are still babies.
“She was really special,” her daughter Julie said. “And I say ‘was’ because it really does feel, in a lot of ways, she’s gone. Because she really is. That mom is gone, the one you can really talk to.”
It has been more than 10 years since John started noticing changes in Emily.
She stopped wanting to cook or clean, and Emily struggled to remember things that had happened only minutes earlier. The cookies she was once great at baking started to taste off as she forgot their recipes.
In 2008, the couple moved from their home on an Edmond golf course to a house in an Edmond senior living community, Touchmark At Coffee Creek.
But after a few years, Emily needed a different setting with a higher level of care. About three years ago, after a family meeting with Emily’s doctor, the family decided to move Emily out of the house into the memory care unit at Touchmark.
John sold that house and moved into an apartment in the same building as the memory care unit. They’ve been married almost 63 years. June 6, 1952. That move was hard.
“It took me a couple of years after I moved her there to get over being angry and feeling cheated, that I couldn’t be with her,” John said. “I’m not sure at whom I was angry, maybe just angry without being angry at any person or without being angry at God because I don’t believe He’s responsible for that. In some ways, I think it would have been easier for me, and this is totally selfish, if she had just died.”
He told that to a priest once, feeling guilty for the thought. “It’s not a sin that you want your wife to be in heaven, rather than what’s going on,” the priest told him.
The Gardners have adapted to life at the assisted living facility.
John shares his apartment with Reggie, the couple’s 7-year-old Shih Tzu mix, a local celebrity around the assisted living center.
His apartment has memories of Emily all around. In the living room, the walls are covered with family pictures and Emily’s artwork, landscape paintings and a blue and green stained glass piece. In his bedroom, two portraits of a much younger couple hang on the wall, a portrait of Emily, a stunning woman in pink.
John and Reggie visit Emily in the evenings, usually. As soon as John leaves after visiting, Emily forgets.
She enjoys the time that he’s there, but when he returns, she thinks he has just left. In some ways, it’s easier on her that she doesn’t remember, John said.
“I tell her over and over, I try to be patient, I’ve answered the same question, I bet you six or eight times, within two or three minutes. ‘What have you done today?’ And I’ll tell her. ‘Well, what have you been doing today?’ And I’ll tell her. ‘So you’ve sold the house?’ ‘Yes,’” John said. “It’s part of the disease. It’s a cruel disease.”
Overall, though, Emily is happy, spending time in the memory care unit, painting and participating in a full schedule of activities. She likes the trips that the unit takes.
And she enjoys when John takes her to the doctor or the dentist.
“She’ll put her arm over me and say, ‘Thank you, honey — you are so good to me,’” John said. “Yep, sometimes I don’t think I deserve that kind of love — but it’s there.”
Source: NewsOK
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