The Love Letter

When my wife developed Alzheimer’s, the story of our marriage kept us connected

- STEPHEN TRUMPER

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.”