Wishing for an Ordinary Day

My wish is for an ordinary day. Just that. An ordinary day. One of those days that goes by without comment, and without remark. A day that does not begin with a strange sense of not wanting to push toward awakening, followed-- before it can be redirected--by the ambush of realization that there is something terribly wrong, that life has taken a really, really bad turn. Oh, yes. My life feels empty. It feels so empty and I am so sad and so angry and to say it all hurts is to diminish what overwhelms. After all, how does one deal with a husband who has been diagnosed with dementia, a terrible type of dementia, no less. All that is "new" here is the diagnosis, the words of the neurologist, who said, "frontal lobe" and "dementia" in the same phrase. Three small words, words that don't change the reality of the past, oh, three to five years of living with a person who slowly withdrew, who got angry more frequently, and more angry with more frequency. The person who once laughed often laughed less and less until I realized he did not laugh any more. When was that last laugh and why do such things always pass without notice: the last time a baby breastfeeds, the last day that same child or another is toothless, the last time a puppy smells like a puppy, the last day of all green leaves before the first one turns in the autumn. These things happen without notice, and yet they are the monumental things of life. Really. These are the things on my tile floors covered with debris that remain intact, small and beautiful and perfect, only I can't find them, no matter how hard I look. No, those three words do not fill the infinite emptiness of my life that is lived alone, and do not restore the hopes and wishes and expectations I had for what my life would be, or who I would be right here, right now. I would give the proverbial "anything" for an ordinary day. A day where nothing happened, but everything did, and the entirety of it passed without notice.  A day like that would be a gift so wondrous that when one comes my way sometime again, I will take note. But I doubt that I will notice the last not ordinary day, and this time will pass, its passing unremarked upon, and sink below the horizon.