A Love Re-Burnished in the Shadow of Alzheimer’s
From the Green Hills of Andover Comes a Tale That Rewrites “Till Death Do Us Part”
Lisa Marshall could close her eyes and still feel the sunlight that bathed the backyard of their Connecticut farmhouse the first time she spoke wedding vows with Peter. She can summon the exact rust-color of the maple leaves that floated down around them like confetti. What she cannot summon is the same memory in the mind of the man standing beside her, because nine years after that perfect autumn afternoon, early-onset Alzheimer’s began to strip Peter of every souvenir of their life together—including the recollection that the woman buttering his toast each morning was, in fact, his bride.
When the Groom Forgot the Proposal
- 2018: A neurologist confirms what Lisa has feared—Peter is only 56, yet parts of his brain are already dimming like towns along a nighttime highway.
- By 2020: Conversation has become a game of charades played in slow motion; entire afternoons vanish into silence.
- Valentine’s Day, 2021: Peter watches a television chapel scene in which a couple exchange rings. He taps the screen, turns to Lisa, and proposes—to her.
She did not correct him. Instead, she asked, “Are you sure you want to get married?” His answering grin split years of forgetting wide open.
Planning One Day He Would Never Remember
Lisa orchestrated a second ceremony from scratch:
Morning: Borrowed garden teeming with late peonies.
Noon: A string quartet playing the first-dance tune she and Peter once chose from an old jukebox.
Sunset: Vows Lisa re-wrote to fit a love that had survived amnesia itself—“I choose you again, knowing you may not choose me tomorrow.”
The Miracle Moment: For roughly seven golden hours, Peter was astonishingly articulate. He danced, he laughed at the best-man speech he had helped write back in 2012, and he cupped Lisa’s face as though discovering it for the first time.
By breakfast the following morning, the wonderland had evaporated. Peter looked at the white rose bouquet on the kitchen counter and asked Lisa why strangers had left flowers in his house.
Keeping the Candle Lit
Less than twelve months later, Peter slipped away the same way memories had—quietly, piece by piece. The second set of wedding photographs, still warm from the printer, became some of the final evidence that a second courtship had bloomed inside a disease built for erasure. Lisa has since stapled those pictures into the opening chapter of “Oh, Hello Alzheimer’s,” part memoir, part field-guide for families unwilling to surrender joy to the diagnosis.
She spends her evenings driving to support groups across New England, sliding photocopied pages from her book across folding tables, repeating the same gentle mantra: “Memory can leave, but presence stays if you refuse to blink.”
