Free Jan's Story by Barry Petersen

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    My attempt at mastering this new profession unfolded in three acts. The first act was taking care of Jan by myself. The second was hiring a live-in caregiver. The third was moving her into an assisted living facility in the United States—on the other side of the Pacific Ocean from our life in Asia. The first almost cost me my job, the second almost cost me my health, and the third all but ended my sanity.
    In our first years together, Jan and I were partners in everyday life. She and I both worked and earned money. I focused on the job with the full-time salary, and she worked part-time and did all of the things, like paying the bills, which kept our household running. She made dinner, and I bought wine on the way home.
    Life is a series of ordinary moments shared, and the pleasure is in that sharing. We talked endlessly, planning things such as where to make a real estate investment or whom to call for a dinner date. Sometimes the evening conversation was just one of us letting off steam from a bad day. Sharing it made it easier.
    We went to bed contented, knowing that we would wake up and make coffee and have breakfast and start another day sharing our lives. There was a solace in that, a trust that as long as we were together we could shield each other from the worst the world outside could inflict. Being together was the core of our strength. The Disease attacked the core. That's what it does. That is its strategy.
    And one of its main targets is the frontal lobes of the brain.
      The frontal lobes are considered our emotional control center and home to our personality. There is no other part of the brain where lesions (an injury to the brain, in this case caused by the disease) can cause such a wide variety of symptom … The frontal lobes are involved in motor function, problem solving, spontaneity, memory, language, initiation, judgment, impulse control, and social and sexual behavior. (Courtesy of the website for the Center for Neuro Skills - www.neuroskills.com/tbi/bfrontal.shtml )
    The diagnosis brought focus to what I was seeing. I knew The Disease would change us, but how? And how much? As a person who loves history, the first months after the diagnosis brought a moment of world history to mind. In September, 1939, the Germans invaded Poland triggering declarations of war. European alliances were forged, weapons were manufactured and sides chosen … but there was no major fighting.
    The British called these months the “Phony War,” an uneasy period that lasted until May of 1940, when German troops marched into Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg and the fighting was suddenly, and terribly, on.
    In that brief calm, no one could imagine how devastating World War II would become … beautiful and vibrant cities bombed to ruins, the unspeakable concentration camps, developing and dropping the atomic bomb. Instead, in that brief period, life went on as before, and one could almost hope that maybe what Winston Churchill called “The Gathering Storm,” would go away.
    It was like that for me, a hope that grew as the shock of the diagnosis sank into an uneasy calm when nothing dramatic happened right away. This was the true beginning of denial, and I deluded myself into thinking that maybe I'd overestimated how bad this would be, so ordinary were those first immediate months.
    Jan could do all the things she had done before the diagnosis … go to the grocery store in Tokyo, work out in the gym if we were at the hotel in Beijing. She went out of the apartments less in both cities, of course, and I called home a bit more often checking up on her. But there was a sense of normalcy, of life going on as before.
    We had dinner when I wasn't traveling. We'd talk about the day before going into the other room to watch a movie— preferably a comedy since I wanted every evening to be upbeat. Life continued in a soothing way even though it was a constantly altering