As her husband slips into dementia, a devoted wife confronts the question: Does love live in the heart or in the head?

By Beth Macy
published Saturday, March 15, 2008

Linda Rhodes’ worst fear is not that she’ll wake up one morning and find her husband, Tommy, dead.

It isn’t that she’ll be fired from her job as the executive assistant to the president of Lewis-Gale Medical Center because she’s tired and distracted. When you’re the 60-year-old caregiver of a spouse with dementia, managing crises is the norm.

No, this is the thought that makes Linda bolt upright at 3 in the morning: What if she dies of a heart attack on a Friday night? What if it’s Monday morning before anyone checks on Tommy, and only because she hasn’t shown up for work?Tommy Rhodes rubs his eyes while waiting for his wife, Linda, to blow dry his hair in the morning. (Click image to enlarge)

Linda knows the numbers: American families provide most of the care for the 5.1 million people with dementia. And yet one in three caregivers dies before the person they’re caring for does.
Still, when people suggest that it’s time to place her husband in a nursing home, this is the story she tells:

Tommy was two years into the disease when she took him for an assessment at The University of Virginia Medical Center. Back then he was confused about half the time. Watching “Shrek” one day, he’d asked her in all seriousness: “Will you get these animals out of the room?”

During a battery of memory tests, the doctor asked Tommy to write a simple sentence. He couldn’t distinguish cartoon animals from the real thing, but this much he knew with certainty:

“I love my wife,” Tommy wrote.

Though Linda had vowed to keep her husband at home as long as possible, two questions circled in her mind: Does love inhabit the heart or the brain? And if she does put him in a nursing home, how will she know that it’s the right thing to do?