Tommee, keeping her promises

Tommee is still taking full-time care of her wife, who has advanced dementia. They owned and operated a book store in Alaska many years ago. Tommee was a teacher, Cat a counselor, so they have enough income to get by, but no extras. Tommee is 80, Cat 86. Tommee came to see me while Cat was taking a nap and could be left alone for a couple of hours. I see that the caretaking is wearing Tommee out, and I asked if she has considered some kind of care home for Cat, perhaps a place where they could both live with some support. They share a condo in the suburbs, and Tommee spends much of her time driving one or the other of them to medical appointments. She wouldn’t hear it. “I don’t care if it kills me, she’s not going into a home while I’m alive, and neither am I. Besides that, we couldn't afford one of those nice ones.”

Tommee has fallen a number of times and has broken her hip, her wrist, her ankle, her shoulder. She lives with chronic pain and what she calls a “hinky heart.” A month ago her purse was stolen in the grocery store, and she lost her hearing aids, wallet, credit cards, and ID. That demanded an enormous outpouring of energy, dealing with bureaucracies and being unable to hear what the recorded messages told her to do.

She told me horror stories of the institution where her great-grandmother was sent when Tommee was a child. I said there have been some changes in institutions since then, but she wasn’t having it. “I promised Cat I would never let anybody put her in a home,” she says. “And I am a woman who keeps her promises.”

Six years ago I posted this blip about her, with one of her poems; ten years ago I photographed their wedding. Part of Tommee's self-respect, amour-propre, comes from knowing that she is a woman who keeps her promises.