Invisibility

It was a couple of months after moving my husband into a dementia facility that I first noticed it. The occasion was a concert of new music, the first such concert I'd attended in a long time. One of the composers whose work was being performed had known George; they'd been in graduate school together. The soprano had sung some of his musical settings, and it was she who had commissioned a piece, a setting of Whitman's "This Compost," which George had toiled on for a whole summer, pretty late in the period when he was still able to compose, and which she had then rejected as too difficult to learn.

At the reception after the concert, I knew who these people were—their names, their faces. Not that such recognition is tantamount to knowing someone. Still, my knowledge of them trumped theirs of me; the composer and the soprano didn't know who I was. Nor, which is not the same thing, did they realize that I recognized them.

The sensation, one with which I was to become very familiar, was of invisibility. You feel transparent, insubstantial, a non-person, at once intruder and also possibly voyeur, in the sense that you are observing people who do not know they're being watched for the simple reason that they can't see you. One reaction is to want to make them see you. That reception was the first time (far from the last time) I remember experiencing the Ancient Mariner's impulse to cross the room, buttonhole some hapless person heading toward the buffet table (wedding guest, concert-goer, the principle is the same), and tell my sad story. Or no, my husband's sad story—which was which? I resisted the impulse, and it passed.

As months turned into years, my cloak of invisibility showed no sign of vanishing. Sometimes, as at that post-concert reception, I would notice its presence in a crowded room. More often, though, I'd be on Broadway doing errands. Walking to the bank or the farmers' market or stepping out of a grocery store, I'd look up and recognize one of George's former colleagues. Sometimes it seemed to happen several times a week. As I stepped out the door of the Garden of Eden market, X would go by, heading north on Broadway, talking animatedly to his wife. As I paid for my of jar of honey and dozen eggs at the farmers' market, I'd see Y fingering apples at the next stand. As I chose a bunch of broccoli rabe in the crowded produce aisle of West Side Market, Z would be peering at the parsley and dill. Once I saw Z in profile (I think it was he) eating Sunday brunch, talking to a man whose profile I didn't recognize, sitting at a window table at Café du Soleil. Then for a while these non-encounters would abate.

Of course on any such occasion I could have made my presence known. But when I imagined the short, awkward conversations that would have been likely to ensue, conversations whose power to irk me would almost certainly be out of all proportion to their length, I always made the same swift choice: leave it. Let it go. What would they have said? What would I have said? Besides, I felt too proud, maybe too safe, to hail them from the impregnable disguise of my transparency. I wasn't alone there in the realm of the invisible; I had company, having often seen the dead walking along Broadway—my mother, for one, who died in 1992, and the poet Rachel Wetzsteon, who took her own life at the end of 2009. I've sometimes seen my husband, who isn't dead, not exactly, striding along. Perhaps I'd caught the condition from my husband, who while he was still living at home, still stalking around the neighborhood and taking daily walks in the park, had become—it's hard to explain, but those versed in dementia will know what I mean—invisible in plain sight.

With variations, the pattern...