I used to love my wife unconditionally, then she became an invalid.
Now I don't love her so much anymore which is sad because I used to consider her my Hero.
Betty was always the stronger, the wiser the more measured of the two of us. She was the practical one, the one you could rely on to distribute the life jackets on a sinking ship.
Betty's choices were almost always unassailable and the few times where she erred it was never for lack of judgment or even the result of impulsiveness but rather a minor miscalculation regarding a decision of such complexity that just having the courage to assert a conviction was an act of remarkable self-confidence.
I am equal parts proud and ashamed that I relied on her all these years.
But then she became an invalid and has sadly become a shell of her former self.
If this all sound heartless and cruel, please, let me explain
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I don't think I'm betraying any confidences when I remind my readers that women have a more intimate relationship to their hormones than men. I will go further and assert that at a "certain age" said hormones begin to realign with predictable as well as unforeseen consequences.
I am not fully comfortable waxing on a subject so particular to the fairer sex but suffice it to say that the shifts in a women's temperament are rarely adjudicated by anything even remotely resembling fairness.
The youth of Betty's old age was seized by reveries of self-destruction. When someone jots down the number of a few suicide hotlines and affixes them to her key ring you know that something isn't right.
We tried therapy, medication, yoga, buying a dog, buying a car, buying a boat ... nothing seemed to relieve my poor Betty of her demons.
Until she joined The Book Club.
"A book club" I hear you say, "how wonderful, how indeed perfect," but I'm afraid my dear readers, the cure turned out to be far worse than the disease.
You see, in this book club the ladies - did I mention it was a group specifically catering to the fairer gender of readers - did not gather to debate the merits of Woolf over Faulkner or even to parse through the wise choices of Oprah, no, this club read only the bible.
Betty no longer wanted to kill herself - I honestly believe she was never that committed to the idea - and almost immediately began on the long-term project of slowly killing me. Almost overnight I went from being Clement the overweight electrician to Digby, the dancing partner of the devil himself!
Don't get me wrong, I completely see Betty's point of view, if in her eyes I was destined to suffer my sins in the flames of hell than what else could a loving wife do but to set out to save him.
A noun a verb and 'Lord Jesus Christ' is not merely a syntactical limitation it is evidence of a cognitive debility that far exceeds the chronic.
My wife lives but she lives as an intellectual cripple. She blissfully dwells in a vacuum governed by the inscrutable sovereignty of the Word of the Lord. She's now a full time warrior in the army of God and all infidels should be put on notice.
My wife has regressed into childhood and my new hero, unfortunately, is a brash fellow who goes by the deceptively solid name of Jim Beam.
