Today I had planned an interview with my writing mentor, Mike Leach, whose marriage I hold in high esteem. Whenever I’m unsure of how to tackle something in my own marriage, I call up Mike and listen to his sage advice. But he was sick this week, so I let him off the hook. Yesterday, when I asked him what he did for Valentine’s Day, he told me he got a colonoscopy. It doesn’t get much more romantic than that.
Mike is a suitable teacher for me because he is living perhaps the worst marriage nightmare possible: caring for a wife with Alzheimer’s. Vickie, his one and only love, fell down the stairs about ten years ago, and since has suffered memory loss. She’s as fit and vibrant as any 60-year-old woman I have ever met. A beautiful person inside and out, you’d never detect her disease. Until she asks the same question twice in ten minutes.
I remember the day Mike called me close to tears (and Mike doesn’t cry easily—I’ve tried to make him on several occasions) when he had to take away her car keys. Another time he called to say that he was about to tell his sons and he was nervous.

Ironically enough, a friend mentioned to me yesterday the movie “Away From Her” starring Julie Christie as a woman (Fiona) suffering from Alzheimer’s who convinces her husband, Grant, (Gordon Pinsent), that she should move into a facility for patients with Alzheimer’s. As I watched certain clips of the movie, like when Fiona tells Grant that “all we can aspire to in this situation is a little grace,” I thought of Mike and his lessons on how to love your spouse in the face of illness, how to handcuff a disease and not let it get between you and the one to whom you said “I do.”
Actually all of the films considered for Beliefnet’s Film Awards—“Amazing Grace,” “Atonement,” “The Kite Runner,” “Away From Her,” and “Juno” (click here to see clips from them all and to vote for your favorite) present marital challenges and offer profound spiritual lessons. But “Away From Her” gets my vote since it preaches the message of a loyalty and love that surpasses understanding and logic, and because it calls to mind everything I have learned about marriage from Mike.