Wonderful memories live on even if they won't be remembered

Think about the very best memories of your life and the odds are that they will include early days with the person you wound up loving the most of all.

1992

I have wonderful memories from 1970 of the first serious girlfriend I ever had, and truly special ones from 1974 with the woman who became my first wife.

But the good times from 1970 didn't survive to the end of the year, and the first marriage was effectively over by the end of the decade.

The memories are still in there somewhere, although they have been tangled up with ones far less pleasant. There are other good ones from the '80s, although that may have been the most confusing of all decades to me. I lived in six different states between the beginning of 1980 and the end of 1989.

Everything changed for the better in September 1992 when I met Nicole. She was the smartest person I had ever met, although I do have one male friend who would disagree. She was a lovely woman, a wonderful mother of two and a world-renowned scientist in her field.

She never bragged about it, but sometimes something would slip through. She would show me something that looked totally incomprehensible to me and tell me that aside from her, only one or two people in the world understood it.

Fifty-one days after we met, we married. Everyone who knows me knows that number, but one you may not know is 8,037, as in today was the 8,037th day of our marriage.

It wasn't one of the better ones. For the last few months, Nicole has been undergoing medical tests to find out what's wrong. Today the neurologist confirmed what we had first heard a month or so ago. The love of my life, the smartest woman I have ever known, will slowly be losing her intellect and her memory and slipping into dementia.

She essentially has Lewy Body Dementia, also known as Dementia with Lewy Bodies. It shares symptoms with Alzheimer's, although LBD has some symptoms from Parkinson's, some hallucinations and some problems with REM sleep.

If there is one thing you cannot get in a situation like this, it's specific information. In fact, other than a brain biopsy -- which no one does -- we'll never know for sure if this is an exact diagnosis. We just know what will almost certainly happen.

It will be heartbreaking, although I will do everything in my power to make things more comfortable for her.

It isn't, as some people might say, the least I can do.

Sadly, it's the most I can do.