The Ninth Inning of Us

Margaret stopped wearing her favorite **hat** the day the neurologist said the word 'cognitive.' It was a navy blue baseball cap, faded at the brim from years of Saturday afternoons at Fenway. She'd left it on the kitchen counter that morning, and there it still sat, gathering dust like an abandoned dream.

Three years later, I was married to a **zombie** - not the Hollywood kind with hunger for brains, but something far more terrifying. Margaret's body moved through our home like a ship without anchor, her once-sharp mind now a fogged window through which I caught only occasional glimpses of the woman I'd loved. She'd stare at television programs she couldn't follow, her fingers mechanically knitting scarves no one would wear. The medical staff called it 'progressive deterioration.' I called it watching someone die in slow motion while they were still breathing.

Tonight, as I sat alone at a **baseball** game - something we used to do together, before - I found myself jealous of the strangers around me. They laughed, they cursed, they lived. Meanwhile, I carried on entire conversations with a woman who no longer remembered my name some days. The crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd - it all felt like a language I'd forgotten how to speak.

'You alright, man?' The guy next to me asked, passing a beer.

I thought about lying, but what was the point? 'My wife has early-onset Alzheimer's. She's forty-two.'

His face crumbled. 'Jesus. That's... that's hell.'

'Yeah,' I said, watching the outfielder catch a fly ball, effortless and graceful. 'But sometimes I catch her looking at her old hat, and for just a second - maybe she remembers. And that's almost worse, isn't it? Remembering what you've lost.'

He didn't have an answer. Neither did I. So we just watched the game, two men in a crowd of thousands, both waiting for something that might never come again.