Flawed
If you’re going to examine your life in public, which is what I decided to do when I started writing about what it was like to watch my wife die of dementia and then deal with my grief, it will get personal, and you’ll run across things like the little story that follows. I could have kept this to myself, but it seems like an opportunity to learn something. So here goes. The other day a friend asked me if I was going to see a certain artist perform. I said no. Here’s where it gets interesting. I decided to say why. Unasked. There’s only one problem there was no “why” other than I simply had no idea the artist was performing.
But for some reason the little governor on my brain failed to engage and I concocted an explanation that sounded better, at least to me. It had to do with the expensive nature of venue A’s tickets. It sounded natural, sounded normal. There’s only one problem. The artist was performing at venue B, a fact I discovered later. I built my reason on an incorrect assumption. Talk about a cataclysmic discovery. Every bit of self-worth disappeared in an instant, crashed to the ground at my feet. What sort of person does that? Not a good one, was my instantaneous reply. What was I covering up? And why? I didn’t know the artist was playing. Big deal. What made me feel as though, I had to cover that up?
This is when I wish I was still seeing a counselor. They’d probably be able to explain it to me. Meanwhile, I’m left to grapple with it on my own, and try to figure out why I felt the need to compensate and exaggerate over something so innocuous. The scary thing is, what if I do this all the time and don’t really know it? That feels bad. You’d think at my age, I would have patched up all those stupid things. But here I am, still flawed. Now I’m left to figure out why and hope my friend doesn’t write me off as a complete dumbass. Damn, life is really hard sometimes.
John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver’s Tale