After we'd been married for three good years, my wife began to act more and more irrational, hysterical, and violent. She wouldn't admit that she needed help. I started making appointments with doctors. Over the next year we got about six false diagnoses, including chronic fatigue, thyroid imbalance, and "There's nothing really wrong with you." After she'd hit me hard with her fists for about the tenth time while screaming curses, I gave up trying to help and moved out. A week later she apologized and took the blame for what had been happening. I couldn't handle going back into the situation and said I wanted to split up. We got a divorce--not ugly--and she moved back to her home town 1,000 miles away.
About a year later she was diagnosed with Huntington's chorea. It causes a loss of ability to control movement, and also dementia. I heard this from a mutual friend, who also said that she was "improving." I called my ex-wife, and she was friendly and optimistic. She said she was on a program of drugs that were having good results.
Saddest/toughest day:
Three months later, I got a call from her mother at 8 p.m. She said, "If you want to talk to her again, you'd better do that now." Then I heard my ex-wife's voice, almost unintelligible, say, "Please come here." Her mother got back on and said, "You probably won't make it." I got a cab to the airport and took the first flight. I was at the hospital in her town by 1:00 a.m. after driving 90 mph from the airport. Her parents and brother and best friend were there. She looked 40 years older and could hardly move. I leaned down to embrace her, and she said something that I couldn't understand. Her mother told me that she'd said "I love you." I told her I loved her, too, and sat there, and one by one people went home to sleep. Her brother and I stayed there all night. At 6 a.m. she woke up and tried very hard to talk to us but couldn't make words. We called her parents, and they got there in a few minutes. She kept straining to talk. She died about a half-hour later.
People keep saying that I'll "get over" this--that it will lessen gradually in my thoughts. It's two years later now and I haven't gotten over it at all. I think about her every day, and what happened gets into everything that I try to do. I feel horribly guilty about leaving her. Then I try to forgive myself by remembering how bad it was and how much I tried to help her. And that doesn't work. And I wish again that she could have talked to us before she died.
He father has since died of Huntington's and her brother has found out that he has it. It's hereditary, and if we'd had kids, which we were probably a year or so from trying to do when she was first affected, they'd have a 50-percent chance of having Huntington's. But I don't feel very lucky about that.