I have a bedtime routine. Every night I slip into my room before my husband. I close the curtains and dim the lights. Then I stand in front of my full-length mirror and slowly pull my clothes off, piece by piece. It is a show with an audience of one: me.

The truth is I don't feel 44 and I don't feel like a widow. I feel married and 80-years-old. In the past four years, I have aged tremendously, both physically, emotionally and mentally. And in my mind, I am still married. Mike has just been gone a little more than a month.

I consider myself pretty lucky to be able to say that my best friend is also my boyfriend. With all that said, it isn't always dinner by flowers and candlelight. In fact, it's more often than not a daily negotiation of the cleaning duties. So, in one week...I discovered the formula for the age old question of how to get any man to do the dishes.

Fragments of self are swallowed up, bit by bit, in the voracious maw of Alzheimer's. So many pieces flew away over the years , I found myself wondering what is self? Which aspects of it are essential? What makes us human? What is left when self disappears?

I'm a list maker. In fact I love making lists. But as time and luck would have it my computer crashed two days before we left on vacation and I couldn't access any of my packing lists. Later when the absence of water shoes resulted in a clam shell injury to one of my daughters' feet, we realized that the first aid kit, newly loaded with all sorts of band-aids, ointments and first-aidy stuff, was left sitting on the kitchen counter.

When you're young, it's kind of hard to imagine yourself doing anything different than you do now, even when you reach the ripe old age of 29. I spent a beautiful Saturday afternoon not chasing skirts or partying with my bros. And, again, I'm OK with that. As we get older, our proclivities and prerogatives change, and I think that's normal.