Chapter 10: A Face Without a Name — The Living Portrait of June Thomas

“The value of a relationship is entirely independent of its physical permanence.”

June and Mike came to Lincoln City with us for this last Monday and Tuesday evening. They were on their annual road tour from Tucson, Arizona to visit with June’s son, and to visit several family members and friends on their return trip to Arizona. Two nights that gathered themselves at the far edge of an absolutely amazing week—a stretch of days spent with family and friends while celebrating Sharon’s 80th birthday, the kind of time that feels, while you are inside of it, as though it might last forever.

It does not.

That is the whole terrible lesson, isn’t it? Nothing lasts forever. Not the week. Not the memory of the week. Not, in the end, even the ones we spent it with.

But we were there. We were together with over 80 friends and family members. And for a little while, that was enough.

Now, let me tell you about June.

Fifty Years of Friendship

Consider what fifty years holds. It holds the entire arc of adult life—the marriages and the divorces, the children born and grown and gone, the houses bought and sold, the funerals attended together while holding one another’s hands. These are not casual acquaintances measured in seasons. These are the deep roots of a shared life, the kind that grow beneath the surface until they become indistinguishable from the ground itself.

We love you, June. I want that written down somewhere that outlasts all of us.

We love you, June.

June was a whirlwind. She could talk for hours, an inexhaustible current of energy that pulled everyone into its orbit. She was an avid hiker and backpacker who found something like salvation on mountain trails, shouldering her pack into the high country where the air thins and the world grows honest. She was a fierce and competitive tennis player. She was, in every sense, a person who moved through the world with appetite—for company, for motion, for the next horizon.

Around 2018, the first subtle signs appeared. A name misplaced. A thread of conversation dropped and not recovered. I offered, that year, to have June stay with us for two weeks—a strict diet and supplement regimen designed to support brain health, everything I knew to throw at the thing I could feel coming. She refused. I do not hold it against her. We are all entitled to meet our fate on our own terms, and June had always met the world on hers.

Unlike Muttley, the rest of us keep telling ourselves we are waiting for a better day to mature. We are always waiting for that day. It is a comfortable lie.

We think we have the luxury of postponement.

June has taught me otherwise.

But the trouble does not live in the body. Not this trouble. It lives in the mind, in the soft gray architecture where a person keeps the record of everyone they have ever loved. And that record, for June, is being erased. Not by malice. Not by choice. By a disease that works with the patience of water on stone, dissolving a whole life one afternoon at a time.

We call it Alzheimer’s. The name is clinical, almost polite. It does nothing to describe what it actually does, which is to steal a person from the world while leaving their body standing there in the doorway, still smiling, still reaching for your hand, no longer certain who you are.

The disease does not only take memory; it narrows the world, shrinks the circle of what is possible, closes doors that once stood open. Each thing surrendered seems small until you count them all together and realize a whole life has been quietly whittled down.

June no longer knows any of our names. She does not know Sharon’s, though Sharon has been her companion for half a century. She does not know mine. She could not tell us the name of her son, Jason, nor of Kim, her daughter-in-law. The name of Victor, the husband she buried, has dissolved along with the rest. Most devastating of all, she does not know the name of Mike, her partner of more than seventeen years, the man who wakes beside her each morning and gently reintroduces himself to the woman he loves.

The names are gone. The history is gone. The intricate architecture of a shared existence—the inside jokes, the old arguments long since forgiven, the thousand small moments that accumulate into intimacy—has been quietly dismantled by a disease that takes without asking and gives nothing back. She no longer has a container where she can hold memories of those she once held dear.

By her decline she had lost an estimated ninety-five percent of her memory. Her sentences crumble mid-narrative, trailing off into a silence she still appears to notice, asking for others to finish the sentence that she can barely remember she started.

There is something that Alzheimer’s, for all its thoroughness, has not managed to erase. June does not know our names, but June remembers that she loves us. The facts have dissolved, but the feeling persists. The record of who we are has been wiped clean, yet somewhere beneath the ruined machinery of memory, a warmth endures. She looks at us and cannot tell you how she knows us, or when we met, or what we have meant to one another across the decades. But she knows, in some place deeper than knowing, that we belong to her and she to us.

Sitting with that fact is disquieting. She has lost our names, our faces, our shared history, the entire scaffolding of who we are to her—and still, somewhere beneath the ruin, the love remains. The fact of it, if not the shape. She cannot tell you who I am. But she can tell you, without hesitation, that she loves me.

This is worth dwelling on, because it suggests something profound about the nature of the human person—something the neurologists have not yet fully mapped. If memory is the archive of the self, and the archive can burn to the ground while love remains standing in the ashes, then perhaps love is not stored where memory is stored. Perhaps it lives elsewhere, written on some deeper stratum of the soul, immune to the erosions that claim everything else. Perhaps it is closer to the marrow. Perhaps it is the last thing to go because it was never really a thing we could hold in the first place—only a thing that held us.

The Photographs

Mike was so grateful that we did. Grateful in a way that broke something in me, because his gratitude was not for the memories themselves. It was because he could use them—use our photographs, our stories, our small hoard of remembered detail, to inform June’s failed memory. To feed her the facts of her own life like a nurse spooning broth to someone who can no longer hold the cup. A photograph, a story, a familiar face captured in a moment of laughter—these become the tools with which he tends to her, patiently, lovingly, again and again.

Grief Is a Celebration of Life

Grief is a celebration of life. That is the whole of it, though the whole of it takes a lifetime to understand. Grief is a celebration, and it is decorated with tears, with anguish, with a helplessness so complete it can steal the breath from your chest. It is decorated, above all, with unconditional love. You do not grieve what you did not love. The size of the sorrow is only ever the measure of the love that came before it. To mourn deeply is to confess how much someone mattered.

So when I weep for June—and I do—I am not only mourning. I am celebrating. I am saying, with my tears, that a life was lived and it was worth every ordinary and extraordinary minute of it. The anguish is not the opposite of the celebration. The anguish is part of the decoration. It hangs on the same tree as the joy.

We are taught to be ashamed of our helplessness, to fix and to solve and to hold the whole collapsing world together with our hands. But there is no fixing this. There is no solving June’s disease. And the helplessness I feel is not a failure. It is simply the honest human response to loving someone you cannot save. It is love with nowhere useful to go, so it goes everywhere at once, and it comes out as tears.

I have stopped fighting it. I have decided instead to let the grief be what it is: proof that I have loved, and been loved, and that none of it was wasted.

Mike, and the Thing He Fears

Mike hopes to outlive June.

Think about the shape of that hope. Most of us, when we imagine the end of a long partnership, dread being the one left behind—dread the empty chair and the silent house. Mike dreads the opposite. He fears what will happen to her if he dies first. He fears the world she would be left in—a world with no one who knows the code of her, no one who remembers the woman behind the vanishing, no one to feed her the photographs and the names and the gentle daily corrections that let her keep moving through her days. He would rather bear the whole weight of watching her go than risk her being left alone in the dark of her own unraveling mind.

That is love, too. Maybe the purest form of it I have ever witnessed. Not the love of shared memories, for those are largely gone from her side of the equation. Not the love of mutual recognition, for she does not know his name. It is love as pure devotion, love as the daily choice to care for someone who cannot fully receive it and cannot return it in kind. Mike loves June across a widening gulf, calling to her from a shore she can no longer clearly see, and he keeps calling anyway. To hope to be the one who stays behind, so that the person you love never has to face the ending without you.

A Plea, From One Fragile Body to Another

So I will ask you something, and I ask it not as a lecture but as a person who has looked directly at what is coming for all of us and would spare you even a portion of it if I could.

Promote the health of your brain. Promote the whole delicate machinery of your neurological life, and do the same for the people you love.

• Use appropriate antioxidants. Feed the machinery the fuel it needs to defend itself.
• Move your body. Walk, run, dance—do whatever keeps the blood moving through those fine vessels in your skull. Exercise is medicine for the mind as much as for the muscles.
• Stay social. Keep talking to people, keep being known and knowing others. Connection itself appears to guard against the darkness that took so much from June.
• Watch your blood pressure the way you would watch a flame near something precious, because so much of what protects the brain begins in the health of the heart and the vessels that feed it.
• Reduce your sugar intake. Some studies suggest that sugar can have neurodegenerative effects. Enjoy that box of chocolates mindfully, keeping in mind the possible harmful consequences of indulging in too many sweet treats too often. Be cautious with sugar substitutes, as they might pose even greater health risks.

Do these things. They could pay you dividends right up until your last day. They could preserve the names of the people you love, the shape of the years you shared with them, the thousand small treasures that together constitute a self.

There are no guarantees, however. I will not insult you with false promises. June did not court this fate. It came for her regardless, as it may come for any of us despite our best and most disciplined efforts. Diligence is not a shield, only a set of odds slightly improved. But even improved odds are worth reaching for when the stakes are your own mind, your own memories, the entire irreplaceable record of who and what you have loved. We do what we can, and then we live with what we cannot control, and we love one another in the meantime with whatever time we are granted.

What Love Knows

We will lose June. We are losing her already, a little more with each visit or phone call, each photograph she cannot place. Someday the body will follow where the mind has gone, and we will gather again, and we will weep, and the weeping will be a celebration.

But we will not lose the fact of her. Fifty years of friendship do not simply evaporate because one person can no longer recall them. They live now in all of us who remember on her behalf. Mike carries them. Sharon carries them. Jason carries them. I carry them, and now, having read this, so do you—a stranger to June who nonetheless knows something true about her: that she loved fiercely and was fiercely loved, and that even the cruelest disease we know could not reach all the way down to the bottom of that.

If death becomes us—if it is woven into the very fabric of our existence upon this unlimited bandwidth, an inseparable thread in the pattern of a life—then June is teaching us something about how to meet it. She is teaching us that when the archive burns and the facts dissolve and the names float away like ash on the wind, love is what remains. Love is the last thing to go, if indeed it goes at all.

So we will keep sharing the photographs. We will keep saying the names she cannot hold onto. We will keep loving June with everything we have, for as long as we have her, and we will trust that somewhere beneath the ruins, in that deep place where love outlives memory, she is loving us right back.

We love you, June. Twelve days from now you turn eighty. We will be there, and we will say your name, and it will not matter that you cannot say ours back.

You remember that you love us.

That is enough.

That has always been enough.

You may not remember that we said it. But you will feel it.

You always have.