When does it become "acceptable" to look the other way or turn the other cheek when a spouse looks outside the marriage for companionship? Perhaps when the spouse faces his or her "darkest night"...
Ethical considerations can become complex when dealing with patients in long-term care situations, and not all spouses would be as loving--or understanding.
Love In the Time of Dementia.
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
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3 comments:
Huh. I would have liked to read more about the O'Conner's relationship, at least for grounding the article.
Alzheimer's is an interesting case, because the person loses memory - my maternal grandmother suffered from Alzheimer's, and mistook me for my mother the last time I saw her before she died, resulting in her refusing to talk to my mother, and only me. That has to make any relationship, sexual or otherwise, much more complicated - both that existed before the Alzheimer's, and after the onset of dementia.
What's more interesting, or at least currently hitting home for me, is how spouses react when one is terminally ill with something that doesn't take the mind, only the body. The insistence to go find another partner after the spouse is gone, to be happy, etc...
If we can be that selfless when we're dying, I wonder why it is hard to believe we could be that selfless when someone else is dying?
Chalk it up to being a lawyer, or maybe just having been around long enough to see the worse parts of human nature -- I had clients who complained to nursing home administrators that the nursing homes didn't keep a tight enough rein on their spouses when they were found with someone else. Sandra Day O'Connor seems more like the exception than the rule to me.
While I am impressed by O'Connor's ability to look to a greater good, my cynicism about the majority of humans makes me ask whether a man in her situation would have been able to do the same, and whether any good would come of us holding this as a paragon of what spousal love should be. It is common for women to be expected to tolerate their husbands finding "love" elsewhere, but the same is seldom expected of men.
Traditional idealistic conceptions of marriage are showing their wear and tear as our biology outgrows culture.
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