Oliver: This enduring love story has taken cinematic turns over the years

Art imitates life, or so the saying goes. Sometimes, though, life can be like a movie script.

As my husband, Tony, and I hit our 29th wedding anniversary, our life together seems to fall into distinct film genres.

At the beginning, when I was in my 20s and Tony was in his 30s, our ages separated by 11 years, our relationship looked like a romantic comedy.

We worked together, and it dawned on me early on that Tony was the right one for me. As the line in the 1989 movie “When Harry Met Sally” goes, “At that moment I knew. I knew the way you know about a good melon.”

It took a couple of years of my pursuing Tony for him to see me as anything more than a co-worker. This would have been the early stages of the script, where our heroine tries to catch the eye of our hero.

Eventually, after persuading him to have lunch with me regularly, we became friends. After all these years, I think that just might be the basis of our enduring relationship: We were friends first.

The path of true love doesn’t run smoothly, or so the saying goes. The fact that Tony was my supervisor created all manner of difficulties with our fellow co-workers. Never mind that when Tony decided to date me that he went to his supervisors and got me a new person to report to. Still, the optics weren’t the best, and obstacles had to be overcome.

We began dating at the end of 1992, and by October 1995, we were ready to wed. The rom-com script would have had some funny bits about the silly things that went awry with the wedding, but love won out in the end.

The next 20 years or so were the type of domestic bliss that doesn’t make for a good script. After all, scripts need tension and drama. Perhaps the script for us during that time would have resembled the 1994 movie “The Paper,” which starred Michael Keaton and Glenn Close. Indeed, most of the struggle and drama was work-related.

The Olivers were a tight little family with a couple of furry “children,” cats Hooper and Harriet.

Then 2013 arrived. The movie script started taking on darker undertones as life started shifting in several ways.

First, Hooper became sick with kidney disease and died just as the year began. And by the end of 2013, I had become a freelancer, my position having been eliminated at the newspaper.

By the end of 2014, my mother, who was in her 80s, came to live with us. It wasn’t long before her dementia started to worsen, and I became a full-time caregiver for her. Tony, for his part, was a good sport about all of this, feeling like caring for my mother was the right thing to do.

Then the sadistic script writer really got busy, turning a domestic drama into at best a science fiction thriller, at worst a horror movie.

In August 2015, my beloved Tony was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease. We knew then that our relationship no doubt would change and that the “us” we were used to would fade away.

Tony was still in his early stages when my mother died in 2018, and we had hoped to have a few peaceful years before his disease worsened. That hope faded in 2019, when I was diagnosed with my first bout of breast cancer. In 2021, our dear little Harriet died, too.

As the years have gone by, my dear Tony has been losing pieces of himself: memories, speech and that quirky sense of humor that had me laughing all the time.

In many ways, this phase is like the 1956 or 1978 versions of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” where aliens take over human bodies. They look the same, but they are not the same.

Tony these days is a lot like that. He looks like the sweet, wonderful man I married, but the Alzheimer’s, what we’ve called Fred for years, has made him into someone completely different. That Fred is prone to violence and agitation just makes the situation a nightmare, one from which I cannot wake.

Still, this love story continues, even if it’s only on my side. I don’t know what the ending will be, but I hope it’s more triumph than tragedy. We’ll have to wait and see.

• Joan Oliver is the former Northwest Herald assistant news editor. She has been associated with the Northwest Herald since 1990. She can be reached at jolivercolumn@gmail.com.