Anne Buchanan

Ihave a macular pucker in one eye, scar tissue on the macula, and now straight lines that I see with this eye are distorted, objects are elongated, the full moon is an oval. I’m seeing things both differently from the other eye, and differently from all the years before this happened. But, when I look at the moon with this eye, it looks just as right as when I look with the other eye, or when I remember that the moon was round for all the years before this.

Anne, Thank you for having the love, strength, and courage to write this blog spot about Ken. It is powerful, devoted, and could be of great help to others whose husband/spouse/partner is inflicted with this terrible disease. For those of you who do not know, I have been a close friend of Ken's since we were graduate students in the late 60s--he at Michigan, me at Colorado--and we were both doing research on demographic methods for anthropological populations.

The Essence of the Thing As most often now, Ken was sleeping when I entered his room. He opened his eyes, said hello, and dozed off again. This is how our visits most often go. I watched him for a while, quiet. I sometimes wonder if he will be surprised to see me there when he opens his eyes again. Maybe he is, but doesn’t say so. Or maybe he’s not. He woke again and said, alarmed, I thought even frightened, "Have I been asleep for a day and a  half?"  I said no. "Weeks?" he asked, more alarmed.