Drawing Close

I read each day to my wife, who is in a nearby assisted living place. She has short-term memory loss, and it has become difficult for her to grasp what she is reading from books or newspapers. But she fully enjoys our reading sessions. We laugh together when I read a funny passage from a novel, and our responses are often the same. I've read to her novels by a couple of authors and she enjoys them.

There has been an unexpected and sweet thing about this. The reading is drawing us closer than we have ever been. Her gaze, as I read, tells me she is not only processing the story as it spills from my lips, but also tells me this is some sort of communion, old hearts drawing close, touching each other in ways that never existed all the years we have been together.

For her, each reading session is a high point of a long slow day. The drifting time is suddenly broken with story, with characters pursuing their lives, and we are caught up not only in the story, but in our own small world.


The attendants see us and smile. Sometimes they listen to the story as they help my wife, Sue, with food or other bodily matters. Sometimes they delight in the novels, and ask about them.

There is an invisibility about the old; the world belongs to the young, and we see the young staring through us, past us, staring toward vital people who have futures, and we are not seen. And that can be lonely. But as we share a novel, in Sue's room, we are visible to each other; we are closer and happier than ever, and we drive the darkness away.