My wife no longer remembers that I am her wife

Dear Delyara, My wife has early-onset Alzheimer’s. She is fifty-six. Yesterday, she introduced me to a nurse as her college roommate. We have been married for twenty-three years. At home, she sometimes becomes frightened when I enter the bedroom and asks me to leave until her husband comes back. There has never been a husband. I show her photographs of our wedding, but she studies them politely and says the women look happy. Friends tell me to meet her where she is. I try. I laugh when she calls me by the wrong name, answer stories I have heard twenty times, and sleep in the guest room when my presence scares her. What I cannot do is stop wanting my wife to know that I am the person keeping her safe. I still wear my wedding ring. She removed hers last week because she said it belonged to someone else. I found it inside a flowerpot. Tonight, she is asleep on the couch with her head in my lap. Her body remembers comfort even when her mind no longer remembers its source. I am grateful and devastated by the same weight against my legs.