Second Time Around

It was a Thursday morning when Billy Saunders was admitted to Peace Hall Care Home. He was suffering from mid-term Alzheimer's, a form of dementia that was slowly eating his brain. Because of the disease, he did not know his wife Rose was already a resident in the home and living in the next room.

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That should have been the end of the story, but really, it was just the beginning.

Billy and Rose were just a normal couple. There was nothing special about them, but this ordinary couple had a very extraordinary love, a romance that was all-embracing, and they were devoted to each other in the most enduring, almost magical, passionate love affair.

From the first time they met, they were very much in love and two parts of a whole. After a short old-fashioned courtship, they got married and loved each other as a couple for almost seven decades. As they grew into middle then old age together, they were devoted in a never-ending, never-ageing romance.

Then the idyll changed as Rose fell ill. Alzheimer's disease started taking over her mind, eating it away slowly but inevitably. Billy looked after her as best he could, having to do everything for her until she finally collapsed and needed urgent daily medical care minute by minute.

She moved to a care home and Billy visited her, fed her and just held her hand. Even when her memory wiped out all knowledge of who he was and she did not recognise him, he was still devoted until finally he too got the disease and had to move into the home alongside "his Rose".

And it was there that they fell in love unknowingly for the Second Time Around.