“What was left was the love ─ that was the core.” This is how my friend Olivia Ames Hoblitzelle sums up the last years she shared with her husband, Hob.

The first diagnosis of his Alzheimer’s disease came in 1995; he did not die of it until 2002. Olivia calls this passage “the most amazing education I’ve ever had.”

There was suffering, to be sure. Seeing one’s life partner in such decline had to be agonizing. “I just lost it any number of times,” Olivia recalls. “There were times when I would roar in my car.”

But, more important to her, “there were blessings woven through the heartbrokenness.” Compassion, kindness, love ─ all stirred within her frequently and still do.

Olivia tells this story in her new book “The Majesty of Your Loving: A Couple’s Journey Through Alzheimer’s.” She has published it under the Green Mountain Press heading.

I have found it to be an eloquent and humanly rich account of the couple’s experience.

In addition to the main text, Olivia has included at the end of each chapter, “Reflections, Suggestions, and Seed Thoughts.” Her hope is to throw light on the experience of caregiving for others who must deal with diminishment of a loved one.

Like other friends of the couple, I felt part of their journey as it moved toward its inevitable finish. The inspiration they provided has radiated outward and now forms part of my own interior life.

Hob and Olivia had a long history of serious interest in spirituality. For them, it was vital to explore various traditions and movements. Through the years they had kept in personal contact with such spiritual mentors as Bede Griffiths, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Henri Nouwen, not to mention many others.

One result of these investigations was Hob’s ordination as an elder spiritual teacher in the Buddhist tradition, a role that helped define the second half of his life.

This spirituality, it would seem, is what enabled Hob to accept his disease in an often lighthearted manner. He described his condition as “horseblinders,” and often joked about death. When asked how he wanted to die, he told the spiritual writer Joan Halifax: “I’d like to die laughing.”

On one occasion, when he and Olivia went out to a restaurant, Hob passed out and fell to the floor. Members of the rescue squad and others crowded abound him, anxious to help.

Hob looked up at them asked them to move back, saying: “Can’t you see that I am trying to die here?”
Often he would describe what was happening to him. “I feel as if someone has taken the wheels off my roller skates,” he said.

As Olivia describes it, Hob’s illness led them to make what she calls “sort of a deal.” They agreed to look deeply into what was happening, to share their findings with each other, and to negotiate the illness consciously and lovingly to the end.

The book provides a beautiful record of the years when they both coped with the illness and struggled to draw meaning from it. The experience strengthened an already strong marriage. In the latter stages they got to the point where “we didn’t need words any more.”

Before arriving at that point, however, they did need to talk about the crisis. One such discussion concerned Hob’s discomfiuret about having caregivers coming into the house.

Olivia had to explain how her own well-being and survival depended upon receiving help from other caregivers. Connected to that need, as Olivia explained it, was the need for each of them to begin letting go. As the disease progressed, their relationship would have to “disengage from its old forms.”

This, of course, was a hard saying, but Hob accepted it. At an earlier stage both he and Olivia had agreed on the value of a statement by Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit. Teilhard wrote of the adjustment he had needed to make in the face of his last illness. He finally came to thank God for what he termed the “grace of diminishment.”

For Hob, that approach presented obvious challenges. For Olivia, it raised the question of how to let a loved one go. Their way of dealing with these issues will, I believe, prove helpful to others confronted with diminishment, either their own or that of a loved one.

One reviewer (Paul Raia, a psychologist noted for his considerable experience with Alzheimer’s patients and their families) says of the book: “After thirty years of practice in this field, The Majesty of Your Loving changed the way I think about Alzheimer’s disease.”
 

If you wish to get the book, you can order it on the web site www.MajestyofYourLiving.com.  It is available at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge; it will soon be in other bookstores as well. You may also order it from the Alzheimer’s Association in Watertown (617 868-6718.)
      

Richard Griffin