- CARING FOR RUTHIE
- A Year of Notes from Limbo
| caring_for_ruthie.pdf |
| postscript-limbo.pdf |
The final version of CARING FOR RUTHIE was uploaded on June 16, 2026. The file was too big to upload as a single document, so I uploaded the POSTSCRIPT as a second file.
By the way, it takes a while to download, so please be patient. It's a big file.
By the way, it takes a while to download, so please be patient. It's a big file.
INTRODUCTION
Ruthie and I have been together for over sixty-five years, and when I say together I really mean that. We have been close companions from the time we met, best friends sharing all that life offered. We came from different backgrounds, from different countries and childhoods, but our educations were similar as were many of our interests. Once we got together, we grew together.
We are still together, but Ruthie’s Parkinson’s disease dementia has come between us in an insidious way by attacking her mind, the core of her being. It came upon her several years after her diagnosis with PD, years in which she was still fully herself though badly compromised physically.
My struggle as her caregiver was always focused on keeping Ruthie safe and comfortable, but more than anything to try to preserve her mental faculties and her means of communication, pressing her doctors to provide the most effective meds to help her to sleep, to relax, to be coherent. To be herself.
It has been a struggle, as these Notes will show. I started to write this one year ago, as I was going through my own sense of losing myself to the circumstances of our present lives. I needed a project to work on, to put myself into besides my primary project of caring for Ruthie. It has turned out to be what I had hoped for, a focus for my thoughts, a place to deposit my feelings and observations over these many months.
It has also grown to an unexpected length and shows no indication of stopping on its own. So I decided to let it reach its anniversary and then stop. Thus: A Year of Notes from Limbo.
Ruthie and I have been together for over sixty-five years, and when I say together I really mean that. We have been close companions from the time we met, best friends sharing all that life offered. We came from different backgrounds, from different countries and childhoods, but our educations were similar as were many of our interests. Once we got together, we grew together.
We are still together, but Ruthie’s Parkinson’s disease dementia has come between us in an insidious way by attacking her mind, the core of her being. It came upon her several years after her diagnosis with PD, years in which she was still fully herself though badly compromised physically.
My struggle as her caregiver was always focused on keeping Ruthie safe and comfortable, but more than anything to try to preserve her mental faculties and her means of communication, pressing her doctors to provide the most effective meds to help her to sleep, to relax, to be coherent. To be herself.
It has been a struggle, as these Notes will show. I started to write this one year ago, as I was going through my own sense of losing myself to the circumstances of our present lives. I needed a project to work on, to put myself into besides my primary project of caring for Ruthie. It has turned out to be what I had hoped for, a focus for my thoughts, a place to deposit my feelings and observations over these many months.
It has also grown to an unexpected length and shows no indication of stopping on its own. So I decided to let it reach its anniversary and then stop. Thus: A Year of Notes from Limbo.