Love and Memory Loss

I have been married to Cathleen for 34 years today. I met her because of the kindness of Jim Baen. Cathe’s father, Theodore Cogswell, was a respected science fiction writer. He was being honored posthumously at the 1987 Nebula Awards. At the time, I was going through a divorce, and Jim happened to have a last-minute opening at a table he’d bought for Baen Books. He called and asked if I wanted the seat. I almost didn’t go, but the promise of a free dinner tipped the scales. Cathe was there with Julie Schwartz, the longtime editor of Superman, and her sister Megan. At one point I was making the rounds with a birthday card for someone. That’s when I saw her. We only spoke briefly, but I couldn’t get the raven-haired beauty out of my mind. A few days later, she called me. We went out, and that was that. I had a close friend, Ann Weil, whom I often confided in. About a week after meeting Cathe, I told Ann I had just met the woman I was going to spend my life with.

The first few months of our relationship, I felt something I’d never experienced before. I was out of my mind in love with Cathe. It was the kind of love where if she’d asked me to step in front of a bus I would have. People talk about that mad rush in novels and movies, but it was new to me. I fell hard. I remember sitting in her apartment on the Upper West Side, her cats Agatha and Emily curled up beside me while I read through a manuscript. I felt a warm glow just from being there, waiting for her to come home from work.

Before Cathe, I was a complete workaholic, and a timid eater to boot. For an entire year I ate Salisbury steak TV dinners every night because they were fast and required no thought. Cathe pulled me out of that small life. I followed her lead into a much bigger world of new foods and new places. I started enjoying life instead of just getting through it.

I stopped working all the time. My first wife, Barbara, wondered why I hadn’t made those changes for her. She was right, I hadn’t. But there’s an exceptional magic in a new relationship, a force that reshaped me in ways I never saw coming. Cathe didn’t just enter my life. She changed it. She made me a better man. We’ve now been married 34 years, together for 40. It has been a lifetime of love and companionship.

We traveled the world together. We travelled to Scotland, Ireland, Peru, New Zealand, Spain, Italy, China, France, England, and Africa. Those journeys were part of the fabric of our lives, as we both loved to travel. But some of the memories I treasure most were far simpler. I remember sitting in our backyard on a hot summer early evening. There is a chessboard between us, two sour apple martinis sweating in the sun.

We didn’t share the same taste in everything. Cathe loves Cézanne and she never quite warmed to the neoclassical painters I admire like David and Ingres. We both love live theatre, but she leans toward straight drama. I’ve always had a soft spot for musicals. Like any married couple, we compromised, and now we see mostly straight dramas.

As she got older, Cathe developed Parkinson’s disease. After her diagnosis, she began to lose her memory. The first signs appeared during those backyard chess games. She had become a strong player, good enough that I had to pay attention. She would beat me now and then. Then, slowly, her game began to slip. At first it was subtle like a careless move. But over time she began making moves the pieces simply weren’t allowed to make. I told myself it was just aging. I wanted to believe that.

Finally, she stopped wanting to play chess at all.

Later, while traveling in Africa in 2024, I noticed something more troubling. Her speech would drift and sentences would tangle or trail off. She would lose her train of thought mid conversation and then not be able to continue. She already had the Parkinson’s diagnosis, so I assumed the memory issues were part of that. But a PET scan told a troubling tale. It was Alzheimer’s.

The following months and years have been the hardest of my life. Anyone who tells you this process is easy is lying. There’s nothing easy about watching the person you love slip away piece by piece. It demands patience I didn’t know I lacked, and strength I’m still not sure I possess. It has forced me to grow up in ways I hadn’t yet, to confront without illusion the nature of loving someone.

What I have learned from this is that love isn’t just wonderful adventures and easy companionship. It is about being there, especially when times are tough. I had the great times with her, now I am having the hard times as she changes before my eyes. I am learning to let go of her, as difficult as that is. When you have loved someone as much as I love Cathe, this ending is impossible to endure. What I want to do now is see her through this final phase with as much dignity and happiness as I can