Madrid (EFE).- Jesús and Mari Luz have been together all their lives, and not even the advanced stage of Alzheimer’s that she suffers from has separated them: when the disease made her transfer to a residence inevitable, he decided to enter with his wife voluntarily, despite not suffering from pathologies and being totally independent and valid, and they continue to share their day to day.
Close to turning 90, he and her 89, Jesús and Mari Luz receive EFE at the Amavir Puente de Vallecas residence in Madrid, where they have shared a room for a little over a year and a half, when they moved from another center in Parla , the first where they settled together.
Jesús explains that something began to go wrong with Mari Luz after a knee operation, about ten years ago: since then they have been “noticing strange things” and they ended up moving to her daughter’s house, since there was no elevator at her usual home. and that meant a growing difficulty for Mari Luz.
Alzheimer’s progressed, and about four years ago the family assumed that their best option was to move the old woman to a nursing home. But, from the first moment, Jesus was clear that wherever they went, they would go together. “I’m going with your mother wherever it takes,” he told his daughter.
For this reason, they were forced to reject the first place they assigned to Mari Luz, in a residence in Moratalaz where Jesús was not admitted. They had better luck on the next attempt, in Parla, where the couple began their lives as interns.
Finally they ended up in Vallecas, closer to his family, and there Jesús has configured a new routine that, as always, revolves around his wife, from the time he gets up to give her breakfast until they go to sleep.
Jesús, who remains perfectly lucid, also occupies his time with other chores: he cultivates a small urban garden at the residence and, recently, has recounted his life in a book written by four hands with a volunteer from the Fundación Lo Que De Verdad Importa .
“That’s it all,” says Jesús, who narrates in those pages how, before he was two years old, his mother had died and his father had left at the head of the Civil War; how he met Mari Luz when they were in the same Catholic Action group; how they got married in the modest church of Escalonilla (Toledo); or how they raised a family while he worked as a trucker.
At the end of the road they find themselves in a residence, she is ill, but together. “This is very hard, being here with her”, admits Jesús, who nevertheless recovers, to finish, the words that he usually directs to her daughter: “I am here for your mother; if he were not with her, she would have already fallen ”.