FOR BETTER OR WORSE POEMS

Abstract

My husband, Ernest Lockridge, died on November 15, 2020. During the year after his death, I completed a book, The Story of a Marriage through Dementia and Beyond: Love in a Whirlwind (Routledge). The title is inaccurate. The Story, actually, begins forty-years into my marriage. It was then that my husband’s “mild cognitive impairment” progressed into the hell of Lewy Body Dementia, and I struggled not to descend into a hell of my own. As has always been my wont when faced with crises, I wrote. And wrote. And wrote. Most of the book I wrote while Ernest was alive and with his permission. I used my ethnographic and auto-ethnographic skills to observe, listen and record our experiences. I was not writing in a journal; I was writing ethnographically---showing, not judging, describing not emoting. In retrospect, I would say, I cast myself into the role of participant-observer. In preparing the book for publication in The Writing Lives: Ethnographic Narratives series, I used ethnographic criteria. Is my prose clear? Evocative? Is there verisimilitude? Am I helping people understand their world? Will my text hurt anyone, and, if so, are their identities hidden? Will my writing reach those who need to read it? Am I proud of this book? The answers to all those questions were yeses.