We Were Married?

Angie Wright

Photograph by Anne Day

Eighteen years after our divorce, Duna started getting lost. He knew nearly every crossroad in Alabama from his work organizing farmers markets and, later, as a lawyer representing teachers in school board hearings. Now he couldn’t find his way home.

Duna was a rare breed—a white, progressive good-old-boy from the rural South. He was legendary among local activists for his keen take on southern politics, outrageous storytelling, penchant for calling bull*#t, and signature dance mix of Appalachian clogging and the boogaloo.

At 5’8’, Duna was only an inch taller than me, and slight. When we met in 1978, he wore tortoise shell glasses, khaki slacks, black work boots and a smile so friendly, it made you want to sing. He joked about city girls, making me laugh despite myself, something he was always able to do.

Every morning, Duna and I would walk to the Kwik Snak to share a piece of lemon icebox pie. In what he called his peckerwood accent, Duna regaled me with stories about growing up in Centre, a small county seat in the hills of northeast Alabama. He bragged that he grew up “in town,” not out in the country, as if Centre was a metropolis. In fact, it was so country, his elementary school closed for two weeks every fall so the children could pick cotton.

When Duna was little, his mother sent him to the door to tell bill collectors she was in the bathtub, trying to delay repossession of Christmas gifts his father bought “on time.” In high school, Duna learned to build houses and spit tobacco from an old man named Mr. Bud, whose spitting prowess I had to question when I saw trails of brown dribble permanently inked down his chin.

Soon after we met, Duna and I began playing racquetball at the Tuscaloosa Y after work. One night, he set up to serve, bounced the ball, looked at me and said, “We’re going dancing tonight.”

Not missing a beat, I said, “That’s what you think. I don’t dance.”

The last time I danced without restraint was in seventh grade at my friends’ bar mitzvah parties. I was no longer the uninhibited twelve-year-old girl I once was, and stubbornly refused Duna’s entreaties.

We made a deal. If he won the next game, we would go dancing. I played hard but lost by a single point. That night we danced at a bar called The Chukker like smitten twelve-year-olds at their first bar mitzvah party. Thus began our romance.

Soon enough, Duna wanted me to meet his mother, so we drove two hours north through blue-green foothills to a crossroad called Ellisville. We pulled into the front yard of a small farmhouse next to a shiny white Buick—not the old dented Pontiac I imagined.

Duna’s mother stood in the screen door waving us in. I expected her to be a country woman with an apron tied around her spreading middle, flour on her hands from baking biscuits, and a country accent like her son’s. I was a city girl, what did I know.

Instead she came to the door wearing a white silk blouse tucked into classy white slacks, white pumps with gold trim around the heels, and a string of pearls. She spoke the King’s English. There were no biscuits in the oven. She seemed so proper but it took only a minute for her to dissolve into laughter at one of Duna’s irreverent jokes.

She hugged me, pulled me into the kitchen and whispered her relief that Duna had found someone to take care of him. I didn’t contradict her. Later on that first visit, she took me aside and said, “You know, Duna has the Hall temper.” The Hall temper came from her father, Granddaddy Hall, who beat the daylights out of her when she was a girl.

I had seen Duna blow up at male colleagues but never thought it would happen to me. For reasons I still don’t understand, his anger kind of turned me on. Maybe I thought it was a sign of strength. Maybe it was because his buoyant yet combustible personality reminded me of my father’s quick wit and quicker temper.

At 22, I was probably too young to get married, but I didn’t know that. At 29, Duna thought he was too old not to. He was in a hurry and I couldn’t think of a reason to wait.

We got married in a freak ice-storm in Atlanta on the first of March, 1980, in my grandmother’s living room, surrounded by a close circle of family and friends. Duna’s long-married uncle said, “Wow, those were some vows you wrote. I’m glad we didn’t have to live up to them. I don’t know who could.”

After the reception, we slipped out of my grandmother’s house, knowing that despite the weather, mischief would be afoot. My father jacked Duna’s truck up on the icy driveway so the back wheels spun without touching the ground. White shoe polish left the words “Just Married!” permanently etched in the green, metallic paint. Friends made smiley faces by smooshing oreo cookies split in half on the truck. Beer cans hung off the trailer hitch. My prankster grandmother supplied all the provisions. She loved a good prank as much as anyone.

In a dream about our wedding a few months later, Duna and I ran out of a church while friends threw rice and flowers. We looked at each other across the top of the truck, decorated as it was in real life, and said, “Now why did we go and do that? We were such good friends.”

When Duna was fifty-seven, he was diagnosed with frontal lobe dementia—likely the result of seven concussions he suffered playing small town football.

Duna’s brilliant, funny, creative mind began to short out like a live electric wire. He forgot how to put on his seat belt. He looked at his truck key with confusion and said, “What does this do?” Sometimes he rummaged through neighbors’ cars and mailboxes, stashing their stuff under his shirt and rushing home to hide it in his closet. His shoes often didn’t match. On a steaming summer day, he might put on two heavy coats. In the winter, shorts and flip-flops. Sometimes he wore one hat on top of another. You might find a shoe on the kitchen counter and a box of cereal in the tub.

Duna’s temper receded along with his memory. He became sweet and docile, almost child-like. Every time I saw him, he lit up with a smile, patted my shoulders and said, “You look so pretty!” When I reminisced about our marriage, he looked at me with surprise. “We were married? We must have had such a good time!”

I came to love him like a dear, demented old uncle.

As Duna slowly lost the ability to string words together in a way anyone could follow, we carried on nonsensical conversations, and laughed until we cried. We washed dishes and raked leaves together. We jitterbugged in the kitchen and drove around town singing gospel hymns, showtunes and Motown hits. He never forgot those words.

As he became more dependent, I helped my two college-age sons do what love does. We moved him into Town Village, an independent living community. We thought he would garden there, but he had forgotten how. We signed him up for water aerobics but he refused to get in the pool, instead taking off, the staff chasing behind him. After seeing feeble old people sitting in chairs lifting one-pound weights in exercise class, he went out the door again. The same with Tai Chi and art, things he enjoyed earlier in life. At Town Village, he hated it all.

We checked out residential memory care units, where one director told us, “Every family has to choose between freedom and safety.” We erred on the side of freedom. The thought of Duna confined on a long hall with locked doors at either end seemed just wrong, no matter how many enrichment stations, serenity rooms, dance videos, courtyards, dining options and games they had to offer.

No facility was suited for a strong-willed, physically active man with early dementia. Duna needed to walk. He needed to work. After all, he had worked since he was fourteen years old, bagging groceries at the Jitney Jungle. He practiced law and remodeled houses. He built stone walls with his own hands, carved statues of goddesses from fallen dogwood trees, and grew luscious gardens.

Now the most basic tasks confused him, but he still enjoyed sweeping the porch, washing dishes and folding clothes, until he put clean ones on over the ones he was already wearing and slipped out for a walk.

One Sunday morning, Duna went on a walk and didn’t come back. He had no money, no ID, and no coat on a freezing winter night. For hours, my son and I drove up and down the roads near the facility, widening our circles as the night got darker and colder.

At eleven that night, the police got a call about a “homeless guy” who wouldn’t leave the Mellow Mushroom pizza parlor, twelve miles from Town Village. The staff called the police who called us. When we arrived, Duna was sitting in the back of the patrol car. “Well, hey, y’all,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

He was cheerful but cold to the bone, confused and exhausted. Town Village wouldn’t let him come back because he was now a known flight risk. So he lived with us for the next month, where he seemed happier than any other place he lived.

We rented a house for him down the street and hired caregivers to stay with him. He hated the house, and hated the caregivers even more.

As he continued to decline, we had to accept that residential memory care was inevitable. Safety had become more urgent than freedom. Confinement seemed the only choice. That’s how we saw memory care—as captivity. Two weeks before he would have moved into memory care, Duna slipped away from his caregiver. Within minutes, he was struck by a car and killed. In one instant, it was all over. Unthinkably, violently, and perhaps mercifully.

I take comfort in the unexpected love we shared in his last years. By twists both cruel and gracious, Duna and I remained faithful to the vow we once thought was irretrievably broken: “In sickness and in health, ‘til death do us part.”

Divorce scars. Dementia robs. Death brings suffering to an end.

None of them had the last word.

Angie has spent her life fighting against hate in the South as an activist and pastor, while trying to avoid the temptation of hating the haters. She has written a book, Loving My Enemies: A Memoir Of Outlandish Pursuits.