Today is a sad day, and I felt the need to get some of it out.

It's hard to believe it's been almost five years. After sixteen years of marriage my wife decided that she didn't want to be my wife any longer. It wasn't me, she said, it was her - she'd been pretending to be someone she wasn't and she just couldn't keep doing that. Of course she had no idea how ironic that was; she knew nothing about my gender issues, and her insistence that it had nothing to do with me didn't make it hurt any less. After all, the person she had been pretending to be all those years was the person that loved me.

This isn't about me, though, but rather about where I found myself after our separation. We had an 'unconventional relationship' (that's what the lawyers called it anyway) - she was the money maker and I was the homemaker. Don't get any ideas - there was no maid's uniform involved. Anyway, I found myself with no idea where I was going to live or what I was going to do. My own family pretty much turned their backs on me - they haven't even called or written to see if I'm well in five years - but fortunately I had friends. They gave me a place to live with no strings attached and made it plain that I was part of their family now.

That's when my friend's mom, Miss Alice, came into my life. She was 79 at the time, and had recently been diagnosed with dementia. At the time she was still very active, still living in her own house and regularly driving down to visit her younger daughter. I helped her out, doing odd jobs around the house and taking care of the yard. A few months after I moved in with my friends, Miss Alice went to fix herself some dinner and forgot about the pot heating on the stove, nearly starting a fire. After that, I started going over to her house to fix her meals and take her shopping, and started driving her down to visit her younger daughter.

Eventually she moved in with her eldest daughter as her condition deteriorated, and while my friends were at work during the day I would stay with her. We'd sit and watch television - she loved those 'true crime' programs, and sometimes I would play my guitar and sing for her. It was heartbreaking to watch this horrible disease take everything that made her who she was, and yet she remained a sweet, kind lady who would never fail to tell me she loved me and was so happy I was there.

Miss Alice passed away this morning a little after 2 am. We'd been expecting it for some time now, but that doesn't make her passing any less painful. I'll always carry with me something she said shortly after I started taking care of her on a daily basis. She'd just finished the lunch I had fixed her, and as I settled back at my computer to do some writing, she walked up behind me, thanked me for the meal and kissed me on the cheek. Then she patted my arm and said, "You would have made a wonderful girl."

I managed to hold in the tears until she had gone back to her chair. I like to think that maybe as the disease was robbing her of her more conventional mental faculties, it allowed a part of her perception to open up, something that could see beyond the surface. Whatever the case, I do believe that Alice is in a better place now, where she is young and fit and happy, and she does see things that those of us left behind can't. Hopefully we'll all be together there one day, but for now I say farewell, Alice, until we meet again. You are loved and we're missing you so much, but at the same time we're happy that the suffering is over. I'm looking forward to that day when we meet again, and I can sit with you and chat and sing and just have a grand time ... just us girls.