World Alzheimer’s Day on 21 September, acknowledges those who live with this devastating disease, and its close sister, dementia. However, for my family, and roughly 65,000 other Irish families, this is not an annual event but a daily reality.

The man I love has been living with vascular dementia for almost a decade. It both amuses and frustrates me how many people ask if he knows what day of the week it is, clinging to the layperson’s diagnostic dementia tool of the days of the week. As if it matters what we call these long days of doing nothing, slowly.

But, as it happens, he does know.

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Except, of course, on the days he doesn’t.

We’ve known each other a long time, since our eyes met across a crowded hall. Giving birth to a love that transcended the Ideal Home Exhibition’s offering of the multi-task vegetable peeler and the life affirming power of the wet-dry mop.

It was, it is, love at first sight.

We raised children who taught us everything we thought we already knew, and buried our parents, our grief cushioned by each other’s arms.

We holidayed using money we didn’t have, to go to places we couldn’t pronounce, and made our home in a small village protected by a castle that kept us safe in its shadow.

We argued too, but rarely. We had both been married before, and were mindful of how fragile, and easily shattered, love could be.

But time flies by when you’re having fun, and before we knew it, we were facing in this new reality.

It was the limpness of his body that first betrayed him, impossible to hide, leaving us both bereft and bewildered.

His thoughts were easier to mask but, as the tide of dementia advanced, the disorder of his mind began to mirror the dysfunction of his body. Making the easy difficult, and the difficult impossible, as this wonderfully three-dimensional man faded from the technicolour of our past to the sepia of our future.

Conversation waned. The fountain of our words, always overflowing, and often trickling on when we woke in the middle of the night, had finally, tragically, run dry. There was, it seemed, nothing left to say.

Having exhausted the unreliable, yet reassuringly omnipresent, Doctor Google, we headed to the hospital. Confronting the seemingly straightforward cognitive skills test, repeated with progressively worse results, although not without its light moments.

His thoughts were easier to mask but, as the tide of dementia advanced, the disorder of his mind began to mirror the dysfunction of his body

Let me paint the scene. He labours his way through the questions before the page is turned and he is instructed to “close your eyes.”

He looks at the page, reads the instruction, and sits patiently.

The gentle geriatrician breaks the silence.

“Can you do that?” she asks.

“I can,” he replies obligingly, eyes wide open.

She gives up with a small smile, as she scribbles a mark on her sheet and points her pen to the line below, which instructs in big, bold letters ‘write a sentence.’

“Now,” she asks, “can you write a sentence for me?”

He looks at her in disbelief. “What?” he asks, “with my eyes closed?”

But as tests follow more tests, we are sadly rewarded with the three-dimensional, life-shattering images we looked for but didn’t wish to find.

“Where do we go now?” I asked the doctor, thinking of the hurdles we had jumped during a lifetime of sprints and marathons. Relishing the challenge of this new obstacle course that we would, of course, conquer.

“There are,” she smiled kindly, the weight of so many endings on her slight shoulders, “maybe some supplements that can help”.

Her words gently closing the swinging door of future treatment; of hope.

But diagnosis helps, and I know it’s not me, and it’s not him.

It’s this.

This disease that gnaws away at the kernel of who you are, leaving only the dry empty husk of the person you love behind. I thought I’d never love again after he left, but I have grown to love this kind, vulnerable interloper who I now share my days with.

Days that have no name, but that doesn’t matter, it was never about the days of the week. Real love doesn’t care what day of the week it is.