Denying the change

This is the part where the story should end happily: At home, Michael would get his full faculties back. Michael would ride the lawn mower, his gray ponytail bouncing on his back.

Indeed, for several months his improvements were marked. He took a few steps on his own, so eager was he to walk to the bathroom by himself — and leave the incontinence pads behind.

He embraced the horseback-riding therapy that Michelle found for him on a Bedford County farm. He happily participated in Bingo and other games Michelle led with the Carrington residents. At the end of her workday, he was just as glad to go home.

For his birthday in April, Michael laughed when he opened the present from his wife, a T-shirt that read, “I got out of bed for this?” He understood the irony.

But her friends noticed Michelle was starting to gain back the weight she had lost. She hadn’t slept through the night in months. She aggravated a shoulder injury from her horse-handling days.

She would never admit it, but Michelle was wearing out.

A long-time believer, Michelle Hammer says she trusts that God will help her and her husband.

At the time, Michael was grateful. “A lot of women wouldn’t do what she did. They would’ve walked out,” he said in early April.
“It’s never crossed my mind,” Michelle said.

“Well, it’s sure crossed mine.”

By mid-May, the easy banter was gone, and so was the gratitude. Michelle dismissed the setbacks at first, not reacting when he called her “Gloria,” his first wife’s name, even though it stung.

When he resisted going home with her, saying that Carrington was his real home, it hurt her feelings. But Michelle wrote it off as a bad day.

Friends and family didn’t. Her mother, who calls nightly from her Florida home, noticed the change in Michael’s speech and tone over the phone. She reminded Michelle that she’d “already gone above and beyond what most wives would have done.”

So did Carla, who could tell just by looking when Michelle had spent hours coaxing a resistant, grumpy Michael out of bed.

The ironic T-shirt seemed a mockery now.

A fast-progressing dementia, a latent effect of the brain trauma, was setting in. Everyone but Michelle could see it.

Her friend Ann Holloman took her aside. The wife of a retired minister, Holloman had tried everything to keep her stroke-damaged husband at home, managing it for 11 years before placing him at Carrington in 2006.

Had Michelle noticed that Michael was slipping? Holloman asked gently. Had she noticed the sexually inappropriate comments he was making now? Had she considered returning him to Carrington?

That night, Michael seemed jovial, but after supper his mood quickly sunk.

“What’s the matter, Michael? Is something wrong?” Michelle asked.

“I don’t know!” he snapped.