Our second year of university threw Peter and me together for even more hours each day than the first. We had two required courses together, chemistry and maths, as well as two three-hour labs per week. Our test schedules, too, were almost exactly the same. We were together almost every daylight hour. Other than the fact that he had once invited me to a movie and I had invited him to a dance at my hostel, occasions on which we had held hands and snuck a quick kiss or two, our relationship remained essentially the same.
I tried to convince myself that all Peter and I might ever have would be a great friendship. How long, though, would such a friendship last once we graduated? Was it worth the daily torture of being around him while knowing he did not have the same long-term longing for me as I had for him? I decided not to mess with the part of our relationship that was working, but at the same time, to expend some of my emotional resources on the wider world. Not that my options were all that stellar. A rugby player I’ll call Jaco, who had dated one of my classmates in high school, ran into me on campus. I had no idea that he even knew me, but somehow he did and he recognized me. Jaco asked me on a date, and we had a great time. More dates followed. Pretty soon we were kissing and cuddling. By the time the second semester of my second year was over, we were seeing quite a bit of each other. I would again spend the vacation in Pretoria, working for my scholarship and staying in a boarding house near the university. (Peter, again, would have a holiday with his extended family in Cape Town.) Being in Pretoria made it possible for Jaco and I to see each other more frequently, but more time with Jaco hastened my realization that he would never be a serious candidate for my heart.
I might very well have worked up the nerve to end things with Jaco were it not that I suddenly found myself homeless. For reasons I still don’t understand, my landlady one day gave my room to a previous tenant who suddenly showed up demanding it back. When I came home after work, my belongings had been tossed on the bed and floor of a smaller and darker room at the back of the house. While I was still surveying my possessions in a stunned state, Jaco arrived for our date. He was much more loudly indignant than I had been, urging me to load my stuff in his car and walk away that very evening. That would have been very satisfying, except that I would not have a roof over my head. No problem, Jaco insisted, he would take me home to his parents’ house, where he lived, and they would put me up for the night. Giving in to the short-term gratification of telling my landlady where she could stick her room, I agreed. At his house, his mother was unfazed at my unannounced arrival. She gave me the spare room and I settled in for the night, at least. His lovely and utterly gracious family insisted that I stay a while and not rush into a new place. I was to have dinner with them every night, which I did. With Jaco as my chauffeur and bodyguard, I found a new place to rent within a week.
Having seen a new side to my rugby player, I was having fun with him again. Besides, it would have been very bad manners to stop seeing such a kind boyfriend. I was shallow enough, though, to follow up on a more thrilling option that arose. One of the graduate assistants in my physics lab, whom I’ll call John, was also working at the Atomic Energy Board, and we got to know each other on the long bus ride to and from work. John was interesting and attractive, and we had a certain chemistry. Even though he had told me early on that he had a fiancée, he invited me to coffee and I accepted. He was a great conversationalist who also played the violin and told me he sometimes seriously considered giving up his science career to become a professional musician. Despite the fact that his juxtaposition of talents twanged my heartstrings, I decided that being friends would be safe. We continued meeting and talking in public places.
My relationships with both Jaco and John continued when classes started and I was back at the hostel. Whether Peter had heard about my male companions, or maybe even spotted me with one of them, I did not know. On a very subtle level, though, he was paying me more attention. Our hands and arms brushed so much it couldn’t be random—we had both, after all, studied basic statistics—and he did wacky things along the lines of his father’s prank. One day in class, for example, he drew a cartoon on the back of my hand, which, of course, entailed holding my hand. I acted pretend angry, but underneath churned the real anger I already harbored toward him for playing loose and fast with my emotions. We still walked home as usual; I am not an ultimatum kind of person.
That evening after dinner at the hostel, the PA system echoed through my floor: “Gerda Steenekamp, front door.” To my astonishment, there stood Peter. “I’m sorry I wrote on your hand,” he said. “I’ve come to wash it off.” Only then did I notice that he had a towel flung over his shoulder and carried a bar of soap. I couldn’t help but laugh—and submit to yet another handholding in sheep’s clothing.
Peter’s cartoon after the hand-washing episode, 1968
Over a number of coffees it proved that it was John, however, who had fallen in love with me. I had at least a crush on him, a mutual state of affairs of which we were both aware despite our ongoing impeccable behavior because of his fiancée. If it hadn’t been for her, I might have given my emotions free rein. I was physically attracted to him and our minds strongly resonated. The labile center around which this maelstrom was spiraling, of course, could not hold. One day he invited me to tea at his house rather than to coffee in a restaurant. There he declared his attraction to me, told me that he and his fiancée were going through a difficult time. I did not need a second cup of tea to think anything through. Having any part in a potential breakup was not a burden with which I could live. I urged him in the strongest terms not to make any decisions that figured me in. We agreed not to see each other again.
(Reader, he married her. Fifteen years or so later, our children attended the same elementary school in Johannesburg.)
Having almost burnt my fingers in that conflagration, I stopped seeing Jaco as well, for good measure.
Maybe partly as a result of my conscience-clearing sweep, something seemed to be changing between Peter and me, and so it happened that somewhere between the agony of a three-hour Saturday morning chemistry exam one week (on Lewis’s theory that the exchange of electron pairs between two solutions on opposite ends of the pH scale results in a dative electron bond) and a maths exam the next week (on L’Hopital’s rule for detecting forbidden limits such as 0/0 or ∞/∞), Peter and I started to study together—at his family’s dining room table.
Peter’s cartoon while we were studying together, 1969
What is there to report about two heads, often bent over the same book, trying to fathom strange new vocabularies deep into the night? What is there to explain about a kiss? Another kiss? An exploration of bodies? Maybe just one clarification is needed: Peter, too, had done important emotional housework before we started studying together. He had stopped competitive dancing and broken up with his blonde partner, who had, in fact, been his girlfriend. (Reader, she, too, loved well. The blonde girl had really never been my rival—rather, a kindred soul. When I met her forty years after she and Peter had broken up, she had spread goodness and healing in South Africa as a physician for many decades. Now, together with her beloved partner of twenty-some years, she is facing her own deteriorating health with honesty and fortitude. Together they agreed she will forgo further medical treatment for her breast cancer.)
I was almost eighteen, he nineteen, when we officially started going steady. For my first birthday that we celebrated together, he gave me a pair of white sandals, an item I had casually mentioned once. For no special occasion, he soon afterward gave me a ring: a sparkling, pea-sized oval of peridot, the soft green of spring grass, set in gold, with the bottom half of its egg delineated in tiny garnets. It was not an engagement ring, and I wore it on my right hand. When we mutually decided to become engaged on the day of our graduation ceremony—when my parents would be in town—that was the only ring I wanted. After a dinner at his parents’ house that included my parents, he ceremonially removed the ring from my right hand and slipped i
t onto the customary finger on the left.
Over the years Peter’s odd behavior at the start of our relationship made more sense. I came to realize that, for Saunders men, “going steady” is equivalent to mating for life. They had to be very, very sure before making what they saw as an unbreakable commitment. Examples abound. Peter’s parents met when they were both only seventeen and never looked at another man or woman after that. Cliff and Ria met as neighbors when she was ten and he fourteen, and they started going steady in high school. Our son, Newton, would continue the tradition. Like Peter and I, he and Cheryl started dating exclusively when he was nineteen and she eighteen.
Reflection on Dementia Field Notes 9-27-2013
In the lead-up to my sixty-fourth birthday, which was yesterday, I have been thinking a lot about until death do us part. If I have any fear of death, it is that it will not be timely enough to avoid the point when I will no longer recognize the people I love. As a friend of mine says when we speak about our mothers and grandmothers, “Old women never die.” Men in my and Peter’s families seem to die early. Both my and Peter’s mothers had decades of widowhood. Since I experience their last years from a distance, with only short visits in person, I look elsewhere to learn about the dailiness of getting really old. Here in Roberta Street, we have two sets of neighbors who are living the ideal most of us have for our marriages or other long-term relationships: growing old together. The couple living diagonally across the road from us are both in their eighties, each coping with serious, physical, age-related illnesses, but are of sound mind. They regularly affirm to each other—sometimes while I’m visiting—their mutual love and gratitude. Our straight-across neighbors, Bob and Diane, are no pictures of physical health either, but for them, I believe, their biggest challenge is that Bob’s mind and personality have been destroyed in a series of strokes. Diane is now in her late seventies, Bob a year or two younger.
Bob and Diane were married fifty years ago when Bob, just back from the Korean Mop Up, or clearing the country of remaining enemy troops, was touring the West with a soldier buddy and met Diane during a stop in Salt Lake City. This is a glimpse of what Diane has told me about their life together: Their marriage has been good, with a lot of jokes and laughter. They have two sons, both in Utah. Their younger, Randy—now in his fifties—suffered a brain aneurism in his thirties, functions at about the level of a four-year-old, and lives in a care center nearby. Bobbie, the older son, is their go-to family when it comes to health crises and house repairs. However, he lives some distance away and is employed in construction, where pay equals presence.
Since Bob’s first massive stroke, Diane has spent at least twenty hours per day in the house with a husband who has no conversation and does not know the difference between day and night, making for an erratic sleep pattern. Bob constantly needs help with toileting, bathing, dressing, feeding, and staying safe. Diane stepped into this demanding caretaker role directly from her job of cleaning houses three days a week, an activity and income she had to give up three years ago when she became a full-time caregiver. Because of Bob’s military service, his medical care is handled through the Veterans Health Administration (part of the VA). The VA provides an afternoon’s respite care for Diane every second week. Other than the approximately eight hours per month that she has free to have her hair cut or go to her own doctor appointments, she is constantly in charge of Bob in a house with double-locked doors to prevent him from indulging his wanderlust.
Every second Sunday, Randy visits for the day. Diane keeps him and Bob busy by asking for their help in the garden. Randy is great at mowing the lawn. When it comes to other tasks, though, father and son need full-time guidance, which they don’t necessarily follow. Once when I walked over while the family was out in their front yard, Diane watched in exasperation as they both attacked the rose bushes with pruning clippers. “With both of them at it,” she said with a wry smile, “soon there will be only sticks left.”
I love and admire Diane. There is no doubt in my mind that she is living out her marriage promises with love, devotion, and an intact sense of humor. And that there is great beauty and dignity in that.
While I have no doubt that Peter, too, will take ever-increasing care of me as my dementia worsens, is that what I want? Would he want me to do that for him in a reverse of our circumstances? Haven’t we both always considered a death of the mind as a sufficient reason to hasten the moment when “death do us part”?
Libido is likely one of Freud’s most misunderstood terms—in everyday language it conjures up the sexual drive, particularly when it goes overboard. In psychoanalytical terms, though, libido is the energy we have for not only sexual love but all life-affirming psychic activity. To function as a human being, some part of the libido must be directed inward, that is, we must love ourselves before we can love anyone or anything else. Pouring all one’s libido onto others can lead to not only psychic but also physical collapse. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, “an older adult caring for another with dementia has a 60 percent chance of dying before the person they’re taking care of because of the stress.”
The Aquarian age that dawned with Peter’s and my upside-down encounter under the desktop has resulted in a forty-eight-year relationship thus far, forty-five of them in the long haul of marriage. Our coming together engendered two wondrous material manifestations for whose coming-into-being we claim credit: our children. They, in turn, have expanded our being with grandchildren: Kanye, now almost eight years old, Aliya almost five, and Dante two. They are my memento vivere, or “remember to live.”
When not going gaga over our children’s remarkable parenting skills and our grandchildren’s charm, Peter and I still pursue our own intellectual passions. He is the holder of eighty-seven US patents related to encryption and other identity-safeguarding technologies in the financial industry. Five times during the past six years, he has been honored as a Utah genius. Now that retirement has freed up his time, he is devoting himself to pursuits that extend the subject matter he knows into the personal realm—he is building a website centered on the under-the-hood mysteries of gathering enough money to retire, which includes philosophical reminiscences of how he and I have achieved that luxurious state (okay, to be real, let’s say “frugally comfortable”), despite starting our lives over in our mid-thirties in a new country.
Over the years, our dancing has sadly been curtailed by the fact that ballroom dances of European origin have now become the quaint pastime of an earlier age. Even Latin dancing favors reggaeton, a blend of Latin and Caribbean music executed in the style of rap and hip-hop, and now almost totally excludes the Latin classics of our youth. Besides, dancing at these clubs rarely starts before eleven p.m.—and we are no longer eighteen and nineteen. That leaves private dance lessons to keep up our skills, which we take when we can afford them. Absolutely free, though, is our twirling about the kitchen while making lunch or doing the dinner dishes or wherever else a charmed strain of the right notes vibrates the air.
In public, Peter and I apparently sometimes appear to be newly in love, prompting smiles or even comments from strangers. The other day, when holding hands and joking as usual, we went into the city-county building near our house to talk to a Social Security counselor. A woman behind the enquiry desk greeted us with, “I suppose you two are here to get a marriage license?” It felt marvelous to show her our wedding rings and tell her that, over four decades earlier,
We sailed away, for a year and a day,
to the land where the bong-tree grows…
and hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
we danced by the light of the moon,
the moon,
the moon,
We danced by the light of the moon.
Chapter Six
Of Madness and Love II
AT THE START OF 2015, seventy-eight-year-old Henry Rayhons, a nine-term Republican state legislator in Iowa, went on trial for third-degree felony sexual abuse for having
sex with his wife of eight years. At the time of the alleged abuse, Donna Lue, whom Henry had met in a church choir and married in 2007, lived in a nursing home because of her advanced Alzheimer’s. The New York Times reports a consensus among nursing home staff and the Rayhons’s friends that they “had a loving, affectionate relationship.” The charge against Mr. Rayhons does not allege that Mrs. Rayhons “resisted or showed signs of abuse.” Care center staff report that “Mrs. Rayhons ‘was always pleased to see Henry,’” who “visited his wife morning and evening, sometimes praying the rosary by her bed.” The case, instead, hinges on the conviction of Mrs. Rayhons’s daughter, Suzan Brunes, and the center’s doctor, John Brady, that a person with advanced dementia is mentally unable “to give consent for any sexual activity.”
Since Mrs. Rayhons’s admission to the care center, Brunes had been concerned that Mr. Rayhons too often disturbed her mother’s daily routine by taking her out to lunches with friends, church, or the funerals of friends and acquaintances. She requested that the nursing home assess Mrs. Rayhons’s mental state. Upon being tested by her family doctor and a social worker at the center, Mrs. Rayhons scored zero on the test administered, because she was “unable to recall the words ‘sock,’ ‘bed’ and ‘blue.’” Their conclusion was that Mrs. Rayhons could no longer consent to sex and, therefore, presumably no longer needed the privacy of her own room. She was moved to a double room. A few days later her roommate complained that she had heard “sexual noises” during one of Mr. Rayhons’s visits. Suzan Brunes complained to the staff. According to the New York Times, “Mrs. Rayhons was taken to a hospital and examined for sexual assault. The so-called rape kit, which the state processed months later, did not identify any signs of injury or proof of intercourse.” By then, Brunes had already obtained custody of her mother, moved her to a different nursing home with a special dementia unit, and restricted Mr. Rayhons’s visits.
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