Consequences are real. Faith is how we stand in it. Hope is how we move through it. And somewhere along that movement, if we are attentive, we begin to sense the outline of who we are becoming.
When I began taking Ozempic to manage my A1C, I knew there would be side effects. I read the literature and paid attention. Two weeks in, after an unexpected bout of vomiting, I panicked. I ordered two bottles of Pedialyte, hoping to stave off dehydration, but missed the sugar content entirely. I drank both in under an hour. My intention was self-preservation. The consequence was something else entirely.
At the time, I was balancing full-time work and full-time caregiving. Jacky, my wife of 33 years, was deep in the fog of Alzheimer’s. The disease had crept in quietly, subtly—like it often does. COVID isolation made it worse. I hadn’t noticed how fully dependent she’d become.
Sunday morning, the day after the sugar overdose, we sat on the front porch waiting for breakfast to be delivered. Jacky stood up abruptly, looked at me with uncertainty, and said she didn’t know who I was. Then she walked into the house and locked the door behind her. I entered the house through the laundry room, but I tripped, fell, and couldn’t get up. I shouted her name, asking for help.
She walked across the street twice, telling the neighbors a strange man was yelling at her inside her home.
Paramedics arrived. My blood sugar was too high to register on their equipment. Off to the emergency room I went. Jacky was left alone. A neighbor took her in, and after a search, located my sister in Houston. The details are blurry, but the consequence was not: Jacky changed that day. She had fallen deeper into the throes of Alzheimer’s.
In less than three months—three days before Christmas—she was placed under palliative care and transitioned into long-term memory care.
In the twenty months that followed, I visited her nearly every day. My single mission was clear: she would not feel abandoned. We sat together and watched TV in her room. We held hands walking the halls each night. We circled White Rock Lake once or twice a week, our final tether to a shared rhythm of life. We had a Saturday dinner date. I put her to bed each night.
I never knew if she recognized me. But when I walked into the room, her face would light up in a way that pierced her fog. There’s a knowing beyond cognition, and in those fleeting moments, I saw it in her. Her joy, pure and immediate, was a gift beyond words. If only for a second, her soul recognized there was more than darkness and fear.
One night, while watching TV, she turned to me with startling clarity and said, “I want to go driving.” Her voice, the voice before Alzheimer’s, was clear and strong. It was almost bedtime, but I couldn’t say no. We took our familiar loop around the lake. She slept most of the way. I will forever be grateful I was there to say yes.
The next evening, the facility staff told me she had fallen trying to stand up. They hadn’t been able to evaluate her yet. When I reached down to lift her from her wheelchair, she looked into my eyes and said the last words I would ever hear her speak: “I love you.”
She had broken her hip. And in the world of advanced Alzheimer’s, that is often a death sentence.
I do not pretend to understand the architecture of consequence. I don’t know if things “happen for a reason.” But I do know this: how we walk through consequences is everything.
Faith is not a shield against pain. It is the willingness to keep showing up in it. Hope is not a guarantee of happy endings. It is the commitment to live a life that matters. I had faith that I could make a difference, and hope that nightly visits would bring about the change I wanted.
All I wanted to do was to protect Jacky from the fear of abandonment. But what I got was something greater.
Being able to say our goodbyes, even though we had no idea of the future, is the greatest gift I have ever received. It was a couple of months after Jacky passed when I was able to connect the dots and learned to appreciate the gift we were given. It is real what Steve Jobs said, “…you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
Faith and hope grow out of trust, and in turn, they strengthen it. Connecting the dots might not be as random as it seems.