Love's Own Language

By Dorothy Snyder

It had been a long, tiring day caring for my husband who suffered from Alzheimer's disease, and when he spit the pill out, I was upset and said in an unkind voice, "Why did you do that?"

I got down on the floor to look for the pill and heard him softly say, "But that's what you told me to do, isn't it?"

I began to cry. How could I have been so cross with him when he had done exactly what he understood me to say? The doctor had told me that he might begin processing language in reverse; that his "yes" could be "no" and a "no" could be "yes." Obviously, when I asked him to swallow the pill he had understood me to say just the opposite.

When he saw me crying, he reached out to me. "Don't cry. Come here," which caused me to cry even harder. Moving over by his wheelchair, I put my head on his knee and he patted my shoulder.

Although he didn't understand my asking him to swallow the pill, he did understand my distress and pain and in spite of all the confusion and damage the disease had done to his mind, his love caused him to reach out to comfort me.

Eventually the disease left him unable to speak except for an occasional word here and there. And even when he could not express in words what he was thinking, in his own way he still communicated. When I did something to make him more comfortable, he would look at me with a soft expression in his eyes, acknowledging what I had done. When I straightened the bedclothes or changed his gown, he would take hold of my hand and caress it.

These gestures spoke to me as eloquently as if he had spoken out loud, proving where there is love, there will never be an insurmountable language barrier.