Lydialyle Gibson in Harvard Magazine:
Not long after his wife was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, Tom Lee picked up a book on caregiving, one of the many he’d devour in those early, frightening weeks, when the future felt suddenly impossible to imagine. Amid all the information and advice, he read a line that stopped him cold. “It said, make sure you take care of yourself, and leave at least 15 minutes to yourself every day,” he remembers. “I thought, 15 minutes? Are you kidding me? That’s not even enough time to open a book. When I read that, I really started to wonder what I was in for.”
Lee and his wife, Antoinette, have been together for almost 50 years, and married for 43. A plant ecologist, he spent his career at the University of New Hampshire, teaching forestry and conservation biology. She was a stay-at-home mother to the couple’s two sons and then an editor at Rhodora, a journal published by the New England Botanical Society. “She’s a wonderful person,” Lee says. “Very bright, very upbeat—and as stubborn as they come.” The two of them loved hiking and gardening together; they took frequent long walks with friends. The small home in New Hampshire where they have lived for decades, on 15 acres of land a couple of miles outside the nearest town, was designed by Antoinette. “She loves it here,” Lee says. “Although—,” he adds, his voice quieting, “her affection for it is maybe starting to fade a bit now.”
More here.
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