I lost the woman I was going to be at seventy five and nobody told me how to get her back.
May 2nd 2026 at 9:17 am EDT
There is a name for the woman you have been losing. The one you used to be. The one you were going to be. Almost no wife in our situation has ever been told she has a name. I went four years without anyone telling me mine.
I saw an old couple holding hands at the supermarket last week and had to leave my cart and go to my car.
Not because anything happened that day.
Because that was supposed to be us at seventy-five. Holding hands in the produce aisle. Bickering about which apples. Walking to the car together. We had been imagining ourselves into that scene since we were forty.
And nobody marked the day that scene was cancelled.
No card. No phone call. No flowers.
Just me. Sitting in the car park. Holding my keys. Mourning a future the world has no category for.
Because his diagnosis was about him. Not me. So who sends flowers for the woman you were going to become?
Nobody does.
And that is what nobody tells you about being the wife of a man with dementia.
The future you planned does not just disappear. It dies in pieces. Every time you see another couple at the table you were supposed to be at. Every holiday photo from a friend you were going to be travelling with. Every anniversary card from someone whose marriage stayed the way yours was supposed to.
And not one of those deaths gets a ceremony.
The Night I Noticed
The Tuesday I sat down to plan my own birthday is the night I knew something was wrong.
I had just turned sixty eight the week before. Sixty eight should mean something. It should come with thoughts about what comes next. What you want the next few years to look like. Where you want to be at seventy. What you are saving up for. What you are looking forward to.
I sat at the kitchen table with a notepad and a pen and tried to write down what I wanted to do even little things.
The page stayed blank.
It stayed blank for a long time.
I am not someone who runs out of things to want. I had lists when we got married. I had lists when the children were small. I had a list two weeks before my husband's diagnosis four years ago places we were going to drive to that autumn, a renovation I had been dreaming about, a friend in Italy I had been meaning to visit. Lists came easily to me. Wanting was something I did naturally.
The pen sat there. Nothing came.
I thought it was tiredness at first. Then I thought it was just grief. I went to my doctor. She gave me basic information. I tried the support group. The room was full of women talking about diagnoses and medication schedules. None of them mentioned the empty notepad.
I read three books. They were all about being a better caregiver.
After a while I stopped looking for an answer. I told myself this was just what happens. You get to a certain age, your husband gets dementia, you stop being as up beat. Probably normal.
Then three weeks ago I found out it was not normal at all. It had a name. And it had nothing to do with my age or my marriage or my character.
It had to do with something specific that the diagnosis did to me four years ago without anyone telling me.
Why You Can't Find Your Old Self. And Why It's Not Your Fault.
Here is what having your future cancelled in silence actually does to you.
Every time something happens a friend mentions her retirement plans, an anniversary card arrives, you see a couple your age holding hands in a coffee shop, you watch a holiday advert on the television you have about four seconds.
In those four seconds you make a decision.
You manage your face. You smile. You say how lovely. You ask about the trip. You congratulate the couple. You move the conversation along because letting your real reaction show would be uncomfortable for everyone, including you.
You do this five, ten, twenty times a week. Every single week. Without being asked. Without being thanked. Without it ever being named.
Here is what nobody tells you about those four seconds.
Every time you manage your face in front of one of those reminders, you are doing something specific. You are pushing the grief for your own disrupted future down again because there is no acceptable place to put it down in public. The retirement that is not happening. The trips that will not be taken. The version of you at seventy-five that does not exist anymore.
That grief does not disappear when you swallow it. It accumulates.
Month after month. Year after year. Cancelled future after cancelled-future.
And over time it gets so heavy that the part of you that was walking toward something the part of you that wanted things, planned things, looked forward to things starts to give up under the weight.
That is why you cannot picture yourself at seventy anymore.
That is why the notepad stayed blank.
That is why some days you do not know what you are doing in your own life.
You are not lazy. You are not depressed in the ordinary sense. You are not failing as a person.
The very loyalty that keeps you walking through this with him is the same loyalty that has been carrying the unacknowledged grief of your own cancelled future for years and the weight of that grief is what has been stopping you from being able to want anything again.
There is a name for what you are carrying.
It is called loss of imagined future. It is one of the most documented and least talked about forms of grief in the entire clinical literature.
Dr. Pauline Boss at the University of Minnesota has been studying it for fifty years. She called it ambiguous loss the specific experience of grieving a person who is still in the room, and the specific experience of grieving a future that was cancelled without ceremony. And she documented something exact about what happens when this grief goes unacknowledged.
It does not stay in the future-tense. It does not stay quiet.
It hollows out the present. It empties out the part of you that knows how to want things. It cancels your own becoming in the process of mourning your husband's.
That is what has been happening to you.
That is what What About Me was written to address.
The Night I Found Something That Helped.
He was asleep. It was late.
I had been doing what I do most nights now — scrolling on my phone in the dark with the sound off. Looking at nothing in particular. Killing the hours before I could try to sleep.
Someone had posted a link in a forum thread I had bookmarked months ago. I almost ignored it. I have ignored so many links in the last four years that ignoring is now my default.
But the description stopped me.
It was a guide. Built around research from the University of Minnesota. About a specific clinical phenomenon affecting wives in our situation. And the description named something I had been feeling without language — the woman you were going to become has died and nobody told you that you were allowed to mourn her.
I read that line three times.
For four years I had been searching for an explanation of what was wrong with me. Why I could not picture myself in five years anymore. Why the anniversary cards from friends made me furious. Why I had stopped buying things for the future. Why I felt like my own life had been quietly switched off without my permission.
That one sentence answered all of it.
I sat in the dark on the spare bed and read the rest of the description with my hand over my mouth. Not crying. Just very still.
For the first time since the diagnosis, something I was reading was about me. Not about him. Not about his behaviour, his medication, his stages. About the version of me that had been silently cancelled four years ago.
I bought it before I went to sleep.
What About Me Was Written For The Woman You Were Going To Become. The One You Have Been Quietly Mourning For Years.
Every piece of dementia content ever written has been about him.
His symptoms. His medication. His progression. His care needs. The neurologist diagnosed him. The social worker visited for him. The leaflets were about him. The helplines were for him.
And me?
I was the woman in the background. I was the one keeping everything running. The one being introduced as his wife who is so wonderful with him. The one being asked how is he today.
Nobody asked about my future.
Nobody asked what had happened to the woman I had been planning to become for forty years.
Nobody acknowledged that the day his diagnosis arrived, two lives were cancelled — and that one of them was mine.
Not once. In four years.
Until I found What About Me.
It was written for one person. Not for carers in general. Not for dementia families. The wife whose own future was cancelled silently alongside her husband's. The woman who has been mourning a version of herself she was never given permission to grieve.
Every time I open it I know that someone finally wrote something for the part of me that had been buried under his diagnosis for four years.
Not for him. Not for the disease.
For the woman I was going to become.
And for the first time since the day at the neurologist's office, I did not feel like that woman had been forgotten.
If you have been carrying this for over a year.
It is getting harder to want things. Not easier.
It is getting harder to want things. Not easier.
The wanting hurt. Every time I admitted I wanted something I had to admit I was probably not going to get it. But at least the wanting was there.
Now it does not come anymore.
I sit down to think about next year and nothing arrives. I look at the calendar and nothing pulls me forward. I open a notepad to write down what I want for myself and the page stays blank.
Some days I feel almost no preferences at all. About anything.
And then I feel guilty for feeling nothing — for being the kind of woman who no longer wants anything for herself.
I wondered if I was lazy. If something had gone wrong with me. If I had given up on my own life without noticing.
I had not given up on my life.
What About Me explained exactly what was actually happening.
The part of me that organises who I am becoming — the part that pictures the future and walks toward it — runs on a specific kind of fuel. It needs a destination to organise around. When the destination I had been walking toward for forty years was cancelled, that part of me had nothing left to organise. So it went quiet.
The blank page is not a character flaw. It is the predictable consequence of having my destination cancelled without anyone telling me to grieve it.
Reading that was the first time in four years I stopped wondering what was wrong with me.
Nothing was wrong with me.
Nothing is wrong with you.
And unlike every leaflet, every helpline, every book that had been handed to me — What About Me did not tell me to find joy in the small moments or to take it one day at a time or to look on the bright side.
It named the future that had been silently cancelled.
It counted every piece of it that had died without ceremony.
The retirement we planned. The trips. The grandchildren visits the way we imagined them. The version of me at seventy-five who was supposed to be sitting next to him.
It told me each one was a real loss. It told me I was allowed to grieve them.
That was everything.
Update After I read it 3 weeks later.
Three weeks ago I could not picture myself at seventy.
This morning I made a list of things I want to do this autumn. The list is short. It is not the list I would have written five years ago. It does not include him in the same way the old lists did. But it is a list. Real things I am walking toward.
I have planned a trip to the coast for the weekend of my friend's 50th anniversary. I am going alone. I am going to walk the path he and I used to walk. I am going to read on the bench by the harbour. I am going to mark the day we were supposed to have, by myself, in the place that used to be ours.
I called my sister last Tuesday and told her about the trip. She cried. She said I have been waiting two years to hear you sound like you wanted something.
I went to a coffee shop yesterday and a couple my age sat at the table next to me. They held hands as they left. I watched them go and did not cry. I just finished my tea and went home.
He still has dementia. The future we planned is still cancelled. There will still be no 50th anniversary on the beach in September.
But the woman I am becoming now has a destination again. Small. Possible. Mine.
She is not the woman I was going to be at seventy-five with him beside me. That woman is gone. I have buried her, properly, with the framework the guide gave me.
But the woman walking to the coast on the weekend of the anniversary — the one who can want things again, the one who has a list, the one who is walking toward something — that woman is also me.
And three weeks ago she did not exist.
Wives Who Read What About Me Are Sharing Their Stories
★★★★★ "I have a calendar again."For two years I had stopped marking anything beyond his appointments. Yesterday I marked a weekend in October. A friend invited me to her cottage and I said yes. I had not said yes to anything in two years. The chapter on building a smaller future was the one that did it. I did not need a big future. I just needed one weekend I was walking toward.— Beverly, 70
★★★★★ "Honestly thought I was past hoping."Five years in. I assumed the version of me that wanted things was just gone. The guide showed me she had not gone anywhere — she had just been mourning a future I had never been told to grieve. Once I grieved it properly, she came back. Not all the way. But enough. Three weeks ago I could not imagine wanting anything. Yesterday I bought myself a coat.— Diana, 72, married 50 years
★★★★★ "Joined a book club."A neighbour had asked me five times in three years. I had said no every time because I could not picture committing to one book a month. After the third chapter I rang her back and said yes. We have read one book together so far. Next month I am hosting. I will not host the way I used to host. But I will host. I had stopped being a woman who hosted anything. Now I am one again.— Lyn, 68, married 43 years
★★★★★ "Honest review from a sceptic."I do not believe in books. I do not believe in guides. I do not believe in self-help. I bought this because a woman in a group I lurk in posted about it and her post made me cry. I read the introduction expecting nothing. The chapter that names the future you have been mourning is the chapter that broke me open. I have made one plan for next year. One. It is not a big plan. But it exists. Last month it would not have.— Janet, 66
"My husband has dementia and I had completely stopped feeling. Not coping — just numb. Going through the motions. I thought I was going cold. This explained exactly why that happens and what it costs. I finally understood what was happening to me. That changed everything."— Margaret, 67, married 44 years
You've Been Through Enough.
What About Me is available directly through the link below.
I hope it helps you as much as it did me I am sure it will.
Never Greive Alone Again
