I remember how disturbed I felt reading Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The eponymous characters felt so untethered. With no real idea of why they were in Hamlet’s story, or how they came to be there, the question of their existence shifted the ground beneath my feet. 

Yeah. I am now Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. 

Oh my gosh, yes. This all has to do with Willie. Who else could get me to question my own existence? 

My discomfort begins with the Temple of Doom. Now that Willie is on the assisted living side, the nature of my care activities for Willie has shifted. 

Also, that place should be called the Temple of Gloom.  

I mean, the staff do their best. It’s a beautiful facility, pretty with its twinkly lights at Christmas, cozy in February with its cheery fireplaces, and picturesque in the warm weather when flowers bloom beyond the French doors and deer graze in the adjacent woods. 

But. 

It’s also incredibly sad. To see people who I am sure were once vibrant, with workaday lives, children, secrets, grocery lists — it forces you to reckon with your own mortality. 

Each and every time you visit. 

“If I ever get like Willie,” I tell my kids, “just put me in a home and forget about me. Don’t visit. Live your lives.” 

“Not me,” said my husband. “Leave me in the woods. I want to fight a bear.” 

Seriously. We are so different. 

With professional, educated staff caring for Willie, I no longer have to do her grocery shopping, set out her pills, stock her fridge with meals, recover her cash from scammers. 

These days, I handle Willie’s social calendar. Willie has a bevy of friends and family who visit. Take her out. Keep Willie socially engaged.  

Most folks schedule their Willie outings — yes, that was intentional — through an online calendar I manage from the corner of my sofa, with my dog at my side, my tea in my hand, and a blanket tucked around my feet. 

That’s much better than, say, going to Willie’s independent living apartment in the middle of the night to dart-gun Indy with a sedative and cajole Willie into putting down the knife. 

True story. 

For the less digitally-minded people in Willie’s life, I manage her schedule through text, emails, and — my personal favorite — phone calls. 

I hate talking on the phone. So much. I love you, but please don’t call me. Ever. 

I, of course, am part of Willie’s social calendar. I take her to church. I take her for manicures. I take her to movies and Arts & Carafes and brunches with stacks of pancakes and pots of tea. 

I also buy Willie flowers. 

Willie loves fresh flowers. So most weeks, I set a vase of fresh flowers in her room. I pretend I’m Meghan Markle on With Love, Meghan, arranging flowers in the lush yard of a California cottage while people call me “Duchess.” 

“You’re the one who brings the flowers?” a staffer said when she stumbled upon me, mid-Meghan Markle. “I thought it was her husband.” 

That’s weird. I thought. Indy can’t bring Willie flowers. He’s dead. 

Then I realized. 

She meant Willie’s boyfriend. She thought Willie’s boyfriend brought the flowers.  

Contemplating the nature of Willie’s relationship with her boyfriend makes contemplating my mortality in the Temple of Gloom lobby feel far more appealing. There are things I know about that relationship I hope are the first to go when the dementia hits. 

All of that being said, it’s still not a surprise when Willie complains — or enlists her minions to complain to me — that Willie never sees me. 

Willie’s complaints are relayed to me in absurd ways, hence my existential crisis. 

For example, I was once told of Willie’s annoyance at my ignoring her, à la Dan Gallagher in Fatal Attraction. 

“She said you never visit her. You can visit her anytime, you know,” I was told. 

But we had all been to lunch the week before, Willie’s messenger, Willie, and I. Seriously. One week prior.  

Had I not been there? Had the story of that lunch been so brilliant that my mind inserted me smack dab in the middle of a repast I never joined? Had Willie walked to the restaurant? 

Then there was the dressing down I was given, full of grievances about how infrequently I see not just Willie but everybody.  

We were at an event. An event I planned. An event I attended. 

Well, an event I think I attended.  

I would think, given the level of ire, that I had conjured my presence at that event. But the protests arose while we were there. How could I remember a grievance I hadn’t actually heard thanks to my flagrant absences? 

“Willie says nobody takes her to church,” another one of her flying monkeys told me. “She gets dressed and waits, but nobody ever comes.” 

That Willie goes to church three to four times a month meant nothing. That Willie is never — never — ready for church when I arrive did not signify. That my cousin drives an hour to take Willie to church, that I go out of my way to get Willie Starbucks after the service — it’s like it was all swallowed by The Nothing in The NeverEnding Story. 

How does one prove their presence? “I am,” I once told Willie, “the most here person you have.” 

“You’re nobody special,” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are told. The comment cements their feeling of freewheeling through the continuum, of disassociation. 

Am I nobody special? Indy told me I was special when he spelled my name differently. Had he been lying? Wrong? Wearing the glasses from They Live, allowing him and only him to see me with Willie? 

I had a flurry of texts this week about going out with Willie. I couldn’t respond right away, inciting another flurry. 

It seems I don’t exist. 

Until, that is, I do.