When Illness Makes a Spouse a Stranger

By DENISE GRADY, NYT

He threw away tax documents, got a ticket for trying to pass an ambulance and bought stock in companies that were obviously in trouble. Once a good cook, he burned every pot in the house. He became withdrawn and silent, and no longer spoke to his wife over dinner. That same failure to communicate got him fired from his job at a consulting firm.

By 2006, Michael French — a smart, good-natured, hardworking man — had become someone his wife, Ruth, felt she hardly knew. Infuriated, she considered divorce.

But in 2007, she found out what was wrong.

“I cried,” Mrs. French said. “I can’t tell you how much I cried, and how much I apologized to him for every perceived wrong or misunderstanding.”

Mr. French, now 71, has frontotemporal dementia — a little-known, poorly understood and frequently misdiagnosed group of brain diseases that eat away at personality and language. Although it was first recognized more than 100 years ago, there is still no cure or treatment, and patients survive an average of only eight years after the diagnosis.

(More here.)