
I was in the mall last week when I saw an older couple (who appeared to be in their
80's) doing something that I thought was very sweet: holding hands
as they walked through the mall. That's something that I rarely see old
folks do in public. (OK, my spouse and I still do it, but we're not
really that old.) Later, however, as the same couple was seated near me
in a restaurant in the mall, I realized that the man's mental faculties
were severely impaired, and he was suffering from some form of dementia.
It was obvious that the two of them had been together for a long time
because they were much too intimate for just nurse and patient, but it
was also obvious that the woman was basically now acting as his
caretaker. His whole demeanor was very child-like, and she treated him
that way - as a child. Which I then assumed was why she was holding his
hand since that is exactly what I do with my son when we are out in a
public place. My initial point of view, the one that saw their
hand-holding as a sweet sign of their love, had now changed to one that
saw the hand-holding as a sign of necessity for protection.
Assuming from their age and their demeanor that they were married, I
even wept a little then, as I thought of what life must be like for that
woman. The man that she had probably married, likely a long time ago, no
longer existed. In his place was this childlike person who needed to be
constantly looked after, this burden that took her time and her
strength. What must her life be like now? Was this how she foresaw her
future with the man she loved? And of course, it then immediately became
obvious to me that many spouses of us transgendered folks have to deal
with this type of drastic change in their lives much before the onset of
any form of dementia. The person that our spouse married quite often
becomes a quite different person later in our life together. And in a
lot of cases, as we have all seen, the union cannot tolerate that
change. I left the restaurant feeling pretty down that day, although it
had been a very nice day until that couple had come in. I had had way
too many negative thoughts to deal with, and I almost resented that
older couple for making me think them.
After I had a chance to process things, though, I realized that I should
not have felt as badly as I did. There was obviously a lot of love
between those two older people, and while I realize that love rarely
really does conquer all, it certainly can make much of the unbearable,
bearable. Yes, I hold my son's hand to protect him and to keep him from
wandering off, but I also hold his hand because it gives me pleasure to
do so. I don't resent doing it at all, even though it is a necessity in
a crowded mall. For the woman I saw, just holding hands with the man she
loves might be enough to compensate her for HAVING to hold his hand. He
may not be the man she married, but something in him has obviously
fought to stay alive and maybe she sees that, too. And while I doubt
that she foresaw her life to be the one she is currently living, I also
realized that very few of us ever see the life we are living as the one
we would have. Reality has a tendency to blind-side most of us.
Finally, I realized that many of us transgendered folks have been somewhat
self-pitying in our perception of the state of the world. We sometimes
have a tendency to concentrate on the broken marriages, the lost jobs,
the other bad things that happen because we are transgendered, and to
overlook the relationships that last or the other completely normal
things that continue to just happen despite the fact that we are
transgendered.
Reality for most folks also includes a healthy dose of
good stuff. Sometimes the good stuff is enough to carry us through a
lot of bad stuff. I think I saw evidence of that last week in the mall.