Saying I Love You

A frozen deer hoof print heart. 

I had just told my best friend Kim that my husband and I were separated. That I would be moving away from Vancouver. And it hurt more to think about leaving her than leaving him.
“Oh, honey,” she said and held out her arms. I took one step towards her and she wrapped her arms around me. This woman started out as a mentor for my career in radio then became my boss and is now a very, very good friend. Kim is the older sister I didn’t have. She is twelve years older than me with long blonde hair and two children. It is because of her that my bellybutton is pierced.
“I love you,” she said.
“I didn’t realize you were so tall,” I replied. Apparently, this was the first time in our two year friendship that we had hugged. “I love you too.” And it was the first time I’d said that to her even though she tells me all the time.

Kim tells everybody that she loves them. At least, the everybody that she does love. Like her kids. Her husband. Her sister. Her friends.  Me. I tell my dog and my husband. If I try and tell my parents, I start to cry.

We are weird that way in my family. All my life, love was shown, not spoken. We expressed our love through eating meals together and taking drives together and by giving two or three cards – at a time, to the same person, for the same occasion – signed always with “Love”. We also gave gifts. Lots and lots of gifts. Not big expensive buy-your-love gifts but little plentiful thinking-about-you gifts. That’s how I knew I was loved without ever being told.

When someone says I love you, it’s very hard to not say it back. It seems rude. It implies you don’t feel the same. To say those words out loud to Kim, “I love you”, while standing in her kitchen wrapped in her arms with my nose pressed to her shoulder, felt very, very good. A little crack appeared in my heart. That crack wasn’t merely letting love in; it was letting love out.
Love can take us to some pretty strange places. Some pretty, some strange but most of the time, entirely unexpected. It’s like love suddenly has to pee really, really badly and jerks the car over to the side of the road then dashes into the woods without leaving any markers to find the way back.
I was quite content to hold my pee until I reached a washroom even if it was nearly impossible to press the gas pedal with my leg bouncing up and down while trying to squeeze all those down-there muscles together. But love has a way of leaking out.

After I said goodbye to Kim and her family, my dog and I drove all the way back across the country to my parents’ home. I thought I was going to hang out at the summer house in Nova Scotia for a few months and figure things out, but shortly after arriving my mother told me that Dad had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. This pretty much answered the question that had been dogging me for a couple of thousand miles: “What do I do now?”  I would help care for Dad.

Alzheimer’s changes the way you love someone. Alzheimer’s makes you say things you could never bring yourself to say before. In my father’s case, Alzheimer’s took away his ability to say anything. The plaques and tangles attacked his language and visual-spacial abilities first.  But in the early days, we didn’t see the significance of this. To us, he just needed an extra moment – sometimes a little help – figuring out what he was trying to say. I couldn’t see that this would mean some day he couldn’t talk at all.

One evening during that first summer in Nova Scotia, my father and I were sitting side by side on the couch watching TV and I had this sudden urge to say “I love you, Dad”. It was right there on my tongue; all I had to do was open my mouth and say the words. There was no reason why I shouldn’t tell my father that I loved him, especially since one day he wouldn’t understand the words, but I hesitated, I thought, “I will cry if I say it,” and the words remained unspoken.
That’s the problem with thinking. It takes the place of acting, of speaking. But a disease like dementia has a way of forcing an issue. First, you move your father into a nursing home but that awfulness compels you to tell him that you love him. Once you start, you cannot stop. You tell him over and over because it is what he understands best.

A few months after Dad had become a resident in the secure unit of the nursing home, I arrived after lunch to find him pacing the hallway as was his habit. When he saw me, he put his arms up in greeting and walked towards me. I kissed him on the cheek then walked to his room to lay my coat on a chair. My father followed me in and indicated he wanted me to sit next to him on the bed. He took my forearm and my hand in his and started to tell me something. By this time, he was increasingly unable to speak his thoughts clearly; what was in his brain came out his mouth as gibberish. I could tell by the way he was patting the back of my hand and by the words he was trying to form what he was trying to say and my eyes filled up with tears.
“Dad?”  He looked directly at me when he heard my voice crack.  “Are you trying to tell me that you love me?”
“Yes, yes, yes!” he exclaimed and I laid my forehead against his cheek.
“I love you too,” I squeaked.

Almost two years after we’d moved Dad into the nursing home, shortly after I’d met the man who would become my second husband, I picked up the phone in the kitchen even though my mother was there preparing supper. The conversation was short and then I said, “I love you, too. Bye.”
After I hung up, my mother looked at me and I was embarrassed. I had known Dwayne only a few months yet it was serious; expressing our love for each other had come easily after a few dates and, with a thousand miles between us for the time being, an important part of our conversations. Yet when it came to saying “I love you” in front of my mother, I had hesitated before responding.
“I wish we were a family that said that more,” my mother said to me.

Dwayne and I have been married for 12 and a half years, and my mother has lived with us for almost nine years. I’d like to tell you that I learned my lesson, that I say "I love you" as easily to my mother as I do to Dwayne and the dog and my friends. I'd like to tell you that I say “I love you” to my mother every day – because I do and I should – but I can’t.
I will cry if I say it.