The Love Letter
The Walrus|January/February 2022
When my wife developed Alzheimer’s, the story of our marriage kept us connected
STEPHEN TRUMPER
The Love Letter

JUDY AND STEVE met on the most gorgeous day of the summer.”

I have recited this sentence, or a longer variation of it, to my wife, Judy Wilson, thousands of times. Additional sentences always follow, and together, they form the longest-running love letter of our four decades together.

In December 2012, at age sixty-one, Judy received a diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer’s. The news was deeply distressing, igniting within me a burning anxiety over how I, a wheelchair user born with a spinal cord malformation and living with bunches of body parts that don’t work so well, could possibly help my able-bodied spouse as the disease robbed her of not just mental acuity but also physical strength. Thankfully, Judy was still relatively spry and lucid, and I thought it would be more productive to channel my energies into anticipating her future needs, starting with a new avenue of communication between us.

The following spring, at the National Magazine Awards ceremony, I was expected to make a speech as the recipient of the annual outstanding-achievement award. Even before I began to write the speech, I knew I wanted to include a short, simple passage that would serve as the opening for an evolving love letter I would recite to Judy every time we were alone together. I saw it as my best opportunity, through ample repetition, to reach into her heart at every stage of Alzheimer’s. As I gave the speech, Judy smiled and laughed. When I arrived at the passages about her, tears flowed. “We met by chance, on Cumberland Street in Toronto, on the most gorgeous day of the summer,” I said while looking directly at her. “I was immediately smitten, remain smitten, and will always be smitten no matter what twists and turns of life await us.”

This story is from the January/February 2022 edition of The Walrus.

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This story is from the January/February 2022 edition of The Walrus.

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