Dear Judy

When the author’s wife, Judith James, was diagnosed with younger-onset Alzheimer’s disease in her sixty-first year, they’d been a couple for close to four decades and together had constructed an enviable life. Her diagnosis threatened to up-end that life by casting them adrift in a territory for which they had no map, no compass, and no foreknowledge. Slowly, by trying and failing and trying again, they would navigate that territory, discovering the scale and scope of the challenges her disease presented and, with love and commitment, figuring out how to hold on to the best quality of life possible.

In Dear Judy: A Love Story Rewritten by Alzheimer’s, the author reconstructs, honestly and with great sensitivity, their shared experience through the multiple advancing stages of the disease, their accommodation of the successive and accelerating losses and the accompanying grief, and the eventual acceptance that allowed light to dissolve the darkness into which their relationship had been unexpectedly cast. We are privy to some of the most intimate moments in a marriage upended by this disease and by the curve balls it would throw, so often when the author and his wife least expected them. In this unflinching meditation and reflection, we learn that life can indeed be enriched by adversity, and that love can, against strong odds, expand, deepen and ultimately reach its fulfillment.

Author Biography

Trained as a visual artist, Michael James has had an unconventional career in both the private sector and academia. His textile art is included in numerous public and private collections, including those of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and many more. He joined the faculty of the Department of Textiles at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2000, concluding that tenure twenty years later as Professor Emeritus and Chair Emeritus. He is the recipient of two Visual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an NEA-sponsored USA-France Exchange Fellowship. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he continues studio and writing practices, and helps to sustain connections among a close-knit group of husband caregivers of dementia sufferers.