Book Review/Moving to the Center of the Bed
Moving to the Center of the Bed
The Artful creation of a Life Alone
By SHEILA WEINSTEIN
Paperback $15.95
www.centerofthebed.com
By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review
Sheila Weinstein heard a long, howling scream deep inside as she listened to a Neurologist drones on in a soft Southern accent the explanation of her husband’s puzzling behavior. She was staring at MRI images of the black holes in the temporal lobes of his brain. Her husband, George of 42 years, a practicing ophthalmologist, was sitting beside her but seemingly not there.
The Neurologist clinically described George’s illness as Pick’s disease, a rare and often misdiagnosed brain disease that would eventually deepen into severe dementia.
“I felt dislocated in time and space, as if I am in a surreal movie,” she writes. Se was jerked into reality when the Neurologist began badgering her husband in forceful demands that he close his medical practice immediately. She finally screamed: “Stop it, doctor. I will take care of it.”
Thus begins Sheila Weinstein remarkable nightmarish memoir of forging a new life without the love of her life. “Moving to the Center of the Bed,” is a metaphor for being forced to move to the center of her own life.
“It is about transforming myself from within, giving myself an inner makeover,” she writes. She vows never to give up her personal care of George, despite being a doctor’s wife and realizing he will get progressively worse.
She began writing a journal to release the anger, grief and loss that are overwhelming her and in that process wrote the book. “I didn’t start out to write a book,” she says. “The book was simply my way of finding my way into a new life.”
She admits doing much “whying,” along the way. Why me? Why him? Why this devastating disease? Once the whys were behind her what she has written in almost prose form is a self-help plan for anyone trying to deal with such a tremendous personal loss.
Her words about finding the strength and courage, all those attributes that one never realizes they have, create a new and rewarding life if they can get passed the pain. Sheila notes that “life may never be as it was, but it can still be filled with joy and passion.”
Part of the memoir is her personal story. She first met George when she was 11 years old and he was 13. At age 15 she went on her first date with him and was already madly in love. They were married when she was 20 and he was in medical school.
“Because George and I met so young and stayed together, all my memories of important times included him,” she writes. This makes what happened to him all the harder. Eventually, her struggles to be his caretaker are too much. He needs professional care and is placed in a care facility.
“My life became like the tracing of a cardiogram, up and down. Up again. Down again,” she writes.
Then late one night, she receives a phone call from the facility. George is missing.
There is a frantic search. He is found ten miles from the care center asleep in the middle of the road. “After prayers of thanks,” she writes. “I get angry at the director of the facility, the staff and myself for having put him there.”
She is living in New York City. A friend in Southern California tells her of a state-of-the-arts facility for dementia patients in California. The director of the facility agrees the fly to New York and escort George to the West Coast and his new home. “There are angels on earth and they appear when you least expect them,” she says.
The book ends on what might be a sad note, except for the beauty of the closure. Sheila receives a phone call from a Hospice nurse in California saying that George has suddenly declined and entered the last stage of the disease. She tells the nurse, “I will be there.”
The last words in the book are italicized as:
“Hold on, my darling George. Please, please wait … until I can kiss you and say goodbye.”
A powerful book indeed for anyone who has suffered the loss of a partner either through illness or death.
(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)