As marriage becomes complicated, Iowan leans on relationship motto 'no man left behind'
Editor's note: Anissa Deay first told this story on stage at the Des Moines Storytellers Project's "Love." The Des Moines Storytellers Project is a series of storytelling events in which community members work with Register journalists to tell true, first-person stories live on stage. An edited version appears below.
I am an Army brat. But I’m not your average army brat. A large portion of my upbringing was in Bad Toelz, Germany, a small Bavarian town just south of Munich. People describe living there like the scene in the "Sound of Music" where Maria is dancing around with mountains in the background.
Bad Toelz was the home of the U.S. Army Special Forces 10th Group. I lived there for the first five years of my life and my family returned during the middle of my senior year of high school. My dad, now a Green Beret sergeant major, got orders to return. I was OK with moving back to our favorite place in the world. I mean, it was the longest place I had ever lived as a child.
Living on the base, I was surrounded by this group of established men. Not young privates just out of high school. These men jumped out of helicopters and high-altitude planes, climbed and skied mountains, and scuba dived in mountain lakes. They were professional soldiers.
My dad knew that having young daughters would be problematic, to say the least.
He sat us down for a family meeting and made it very clear that my sister and I were not allowed to go to the club.
So, what do I do? Well, I go and meet friends at the club, and I see this beautiful man with amazing blue eyes.
Dudley is 20 years older. He enjoys history, hiking, bike riding, music, and more. Our group of friends, a mix of soldiers and high schoolers, would raft down the Isar River, drink at the Hofbrauhaus, and just have a great time. But, I would watch him like a hawk.
Dudley would never have anything to do with me. Then at a party in Munich, I got a kiss. He was quick to tell me that I was way too young. I told him, “I am going to marry you, Dudley,” and I walked away.
I eventually went off to college in the U.S. Dudley and my dad were both deployed on Operation Provide Comfort in Turkey.
From my college dorm room in Santa Fe, I watched CNN news coverage of the war just to figure out where they were that day. In the letters from Dudley, he would paint a picture of arid mountains and describe the Kurdish people.
Eventually, their group returned to Bad Toelz, and I returned too. The worry of war made me need to be close to family. I did not want to venture too far.
Dudley and I meet up again and now we are dating. We are together all the time, going to concerts, dining out, visiting museums and traveling Europe.
Dudley had many hardships before meeting me. He had been married twice. He had a young son pass away. He also battled cancer. He resigned to be a bachelor.
Dudley had many girlfriends. Once I found out that he was traveling in Portugal with a girlfriend while we were dating, I was heartbroken. We broke up. Several months later I get a letter. He asked me to meet him in Munich, in front of the Augustiner bier tent at Oktoberfest on Saturday at 7 p.m.
It worked.
We traveled around Europe, and in Prague, we decided we will get married.
We finally got married in Stuttgart. A few months later, we moved back to the states, first moving to Fort Devens, Massachusetts, where our family started to grow, and then onto Fort Carson, Colorado. After a few years, Dudley retired and we moved to Des Moines, his hometown. I was a fish out of water here. Having grown up around the world, I never in a million years thought I would be raising my family in Iowa.
But I delved into my work and Dudley and I started to build a happy life here together. As our daughter became a teen, Dudley continually reinforced this family mission statement: no man gets left behind.
But all of a sudden, I noticed going out to dinner, one of our favorite things to do together, became a challenge. Everything became an argument: from picking out what restaurant it was going to be to figure out how much to tip on the check.
Being second-guessed all the time, I started to question all of my choices. And Dudley changed over this time, too. He kept losing his cell phone. He kept losing his car keys. He lost the garage door opener. I'd have to get up at four o'clock in the morning to let him out. Shut the garage. Climb back into bed and repeat over and over and over again.
I started realizing something was wrong not only with our relationship but with Dudley.
In 2019, Dudley went in for what was supposed to be a two-hour surgery on his stomach, but it turned into 10 hours. He suffered serious complications, and when he woke up in the ICU, boy, was he mad at the world. I can't do anything right. I can't sit there. I can't talk to him. When I do he gets angry at me.
Within a day and a half of him getting released, he threw something at me across the room. We called for mental health support, and he ended up being put in jail for domestic abuse.
After being released from jail, he went to the VA hospital with the help of friends. Staff then told him he had dementia. A nurse pulled me aside and asked me: “Does your husband do meth?” I told her flat out “no.” But then she told me his blood work came back positive for meth. I was shocked. The hair stood on the back of my neck.
It was like he no longer resembled the man I married.
My family came to help me. We cleaned out the house and found drugs hidden throughout. All of a sudden, my dining room table looked like a scene out of "Breaking Bad."
We tried to work through it, but I caught him using in the house, and I told him: “you have to go, you’re not keeping us safe.”
He didn’t put up a fight. He just left and went to live with his parents. For two years during COVID, we were estranged.
We've tried to sit down and have a conversation. What our marriage is going to look like? Is it going to be a divorce? Is it going to be a separation? Can we get back together? I don't know. I don't think he's getting the help he needs.
In September of last year, Dudley’s parents passed away within weeks of each other. After they passed, Dudley went into a deep, deep depression. I would get these long, winding, strange text messages from him. I can sense that something's not right. It's not him. That's not my husband that's texting me.
Out of pure luck, I discovered people were taking advantage of Dudley and taking money from his bank accounts.
Now he didn’t have any access to his own money. Things were getting out of hand. I knew someone had to clean up this mess. My daughter and I called DHS, we call the Polk County sheriff department, and we call the Des Moines Police Department. We get all the resources we can. This is bad. We need help.
Finally, we get him into the VA. We get the help that we need. His dementia is really set in now. His short-term memory is gone. He can’t even remember spreading his mother’s ashes.
But he is clean, and he looks amazing — he’s growing a perfect beard, and he looks like a well-groomed Bavarian man.
The beautiful man that I married and fell in love with 30 years ago has changed because of his brain’s unraveling. There are pieces of him that are still there. I can look into his eyes. Smile. Remember how things used to be holding his hand and going for walks.
Dudley is back in my life now, but things are different. I visit him about two to three times a week in the hospital and I call him every day.
We talk, but he often repeats questions. So how was your day today? How are the kids? Oh, that's great. Yeah, I ate some food. They're always trying to feed me here. Sometimes our visits are sad, or depressing, but then they’re loving, fun, and light.
No matter what, I sit there and smile at him. I miss him. I miss my husband. Sometimes there are glimpses of him coming back — I remember visiting just a few weeks ago and we talked about how he always wanted to take me to Morocco. But I said I don’t want to go to Morocco, I’d rather go back to Bad Toelz. He looked at me and his eyes lit up, and he said “me too.”
Now I have to try and navigate my relationship. What does it look like to be a wife to someone who is cognitively fading?
I think back now to all the people who told me to leave him, but I couldn’t. I know now what my young self frolicking around Bad Toelz didn’t at the time: marriage isn’t a fairytale. But I also think back to our family mission statement, of the commitment that no man gets left behind.
I kind of feel like that’s where I’m at. I am not going to let him go.
ABOUT THE STORYTELLER: Anissa Deay followed her husband around the world. Once he retired from the Army, her family moved to her husband's hometown, Des Moines. Anissa is a director and has been in early care and education for 35 years. During this time, she also taught childbirth education classes and worked as a Doula. Anissa's passion is family, reading, gardening and learning.
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This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: During complicated marriage, Iowan leans on 'no man left behind' motto
