Flannery O’Connor, that cantankerously brilliant writer from Georgia, is reported to have said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.”  

That’s me! I thought when I first saw this. I feel … odd! It was a peculiar twist on John 8:32 (“…and the truth shall make you free.”)

Not long after Martha’s diagnosis, I began to search far and wide for any hint of how we might get out of this thing called Alzheimer’s. I looked into alternative medicines and into alternative spiritual practices. 

“We’re all on a journey.” You’ve heard that expression, I’m sure. I never gave it much thought, though. It was for me a bland cliché without bite or taste.  

That is, until my wife and I hit the wall with her diagnosis of Alzheimer’s in 1997. But even then I didn’t recognize that we were on some kind of “path.” All we wanted was to wake up from this nightmare and be told it wasn’t true. I didn’t want to know that we were “on a journey.”

I thought I knew what fear was. Turns out I didn’t know the difference between a common fear and a nightmarish one until I was 52 years old. That’s when my wife Martha was told she “may” have Alzheimer’s disease. I say “may” because this disease can’t truly be diagnosed except by autopsy. So there we were, as I describe in my forthcoming book A Path Revealed—looking into an unknown future with no solutions. 

After that jolt, I thought nothing else could shock me. But almost two years later I was forced to take Martha’s car keys away. As she stormed upstairs crying, I cried to myself, I didn’t just take her keys away—I cut her heart out.