Fooling Around at 81
“It was inspired from my emotions during her cancer years, specifically as we kissed and I felt her breath enter me and understood that our soul – our breath—had become one --- that is what Love really means. And it involves that physical interaction … a kiss – the exchange of breath.”
Susan is about to catch up with me --- she turns 81 on October 25, 2026. And on her birthday, we will have been married 60 years, 2 months and 2 days!
What a life together – and yes, sex perhaps had a “lot” to do with it. We do remember that it was sometime in 1961 – or around that time that we first met. I have always thought we were both 16, which meant it had to be in the Fall of that year. Perhaps.
For some reason I thought it was the summer, but then Susan would have only been 15! Susan lived in Houston, Texas, and I lived in El Paso, Texas. That’s about 744 miles apart, 12 hours by car.
We both remember ‘noticing’ each other at a regional conference in Texarkana of kids belonging to the B’nai Brith Youth Groups – AZA for boys and BBG for girls. “Noticing” in that teenage sort of way. Making “googly eyes” and in some group dances being next to each other. I remember as I was heading home in a Greyhound Bus, Susan ran/walk alongside the bus waving at me. We met later again in college, in El Paso, and started dating around 1964 and got married in 1966. Susan was 20 still, and I had just turned 21.
Now 60 years, 2 months and 2 days later, we are still married. And we still googly-eye each other, occasionally. When talking about this journey I am always careful to note that it hasn’t always been smooth. We were both in therapy between the 14 to 16th year of the journey. Once, much later, we were part of a filming of stories of couples that had gone through “breast cancer” – Susan is a survivor --- and asked by a college student what our “secret” was – because she seemed to sense that we were “so in love.” The answer was “a sacred promise” ---there are in life promises that cannot be broken. And that is a story for perhaps a different essay.
Now, as we travel along this journey in our early 80’s and me with early-stage Alzheimer’s – we keep that promise. Our story is different in the sense that around 2006 Susan developed advanced beat cancer, the doctors told me she was going to die. She had a double mastectomy. She did not die, they mistook a post-mastectomy lump as the return of her cancer, instead of the water-cyst that it was. So the story of fooling around – or the “attraction” – to each other has a couple of iterations. One for me getting used to the woman whose breasts used to perk-up as I was touching her/them and aroused her (and me.) To bags filled with liquid sown into her chest. She would tell me to “stop it” every time I tried to touch them, because she felt nothing.
Leap forward now 25 years later and I’m a guy with Alzheimer’s and I am also 81, and I also have a history of “low testosterone.” I took medicines for a long time to make things work.
We never though stopped desiring each other, wanting to hold, touch, touch in “those places” – and kiss each other. The last few years things have aged down – from a physical sense and need, though not from the need to hold, touch and kiss – at times.
We still sleep in the same bed and were shocked when we heard friends and neighbors confess that they and their partners now sleep in separate bedrooms. We can’t imagine that – except we know that it might become necessary if my disease gets a lot worse. I might become “someone else” and I might become rough or violent --- you know a neurocognitive disease (aka dementia) might cause that. Otherwise, it has never occurred to us for any reason to do that.
Our rituals – the kiss and holding before turning off the lights, and the kiss after our morning clean up before we start the day is critical to our life together. Yes, it sounds rote, and yet it feels more. We hug randomly as the moment calls for it.
Yes, we are no longer teenagers, nor young adults. We remember when the urges and needs abated, the physical ones. The emotional ones -the expression of the love we have for each other has not abated nor become rote or routine. We have children nearing retirement age, and grandchildren getting to an age they too could find a life-partner.
Somehow, our relationship has taken on a poetic quality. We even have people tell us they can see or sense the love we have for one another. I do wonder if it is related to the fact that we have each faced the death of the other. Me during Susan’s breast cancer journey, and now we both know Alzheimer’s has no cure.
Or maybe it is just that late in life I have become an actor, playwright and poet. A book of my poems is in progress. I think now about the first poem I remember writing, and it tells the story of what “love” really means – and it does include a hint of that urge – it is called US.
It was inspired from my emotions during her cancer years, specifically as we kissed and I felt her breath enter me and understood that our soul – our breath—had become one --- that is what Love really means. And it involves that physical interaction … a kiss –the exchange of breath.
Life exists within each of us as a form of the Divine.
A tangible essence of who we are.
Love is when our essence became entwined.
Each an equal half of the other.
“I love you” simply awakens the US in you and me.
- US by Sam Simon
About Sam Simon
Samuel A. (Sam) Simon started his career in Washington, DC, as a lawyer for Ralph Nader’s first advocacy group. He then spent 25 years as head of a public affairs firm. In that work, he was often in the news, appearing on Face The Nation, Phil Donahue Show, Oprah Winfrey Show, Good Morning America, and many more. Sam calls his playwriting and theatre work his 4th Age. His first play, The Actual Dance, Love’s Ultimate Journey Through Breast Cancer , was later turned into an award-winning memoir.
In 2021, Sam was diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s. Despite the enormous challenges of this diagnosis, Sam has become “Dementia Man,” a powerful advocate through theater, using his own experience as inspiration to reshape the narrative surrounding cognitive decline. With his newest play Dementia Man, An Existential Journey, Sam defies stereotypes and inspires audiences. Sam lives in Mclean, Virginia, with his wife Susan. They have two children and four grandchildren.