AUSTINTOWN — Bruce Meixelberger has breakfast with his wife, Kathie, every morning, and every morning he tells her he loves her and she’s his sweetheart.

And every day, Kathie forgets.

So Bruce goes back the next day and does it again, knowing she will not remember it, and that she may not even remember him.

Kathie, 75, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease about two and a half years ago, and now resides in Brookdale Austintown, an assisted living facility for adults with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.

Bruce visits her every day, to feed her breakfast and spend time with her.

“At this point, I’m trying to keep her as comfortable as I can and make sure she gets what she needs,” he said. “They tell me here, ‘you’re such a good husband, you come every day,’ well,

I don’t feel I have a choice. Plus, I want to be here.”

Bruce sees it from another side, too: Kathie’s.

“My belief is I’ll do whatever I can to take care of her, but if it was the other way around, she’d be doing even more to take care of me. So, with that in mind I’ve gotta do the best I can.”

Bruce cared for her at home for a while after her diagnosis, but it became unsustainable.

“I realized one day I wasn’t doing any favors for her because I just couldn’t give her everything that she needed,” he said. “I went to pick her up to move her to the chair or the bed and she went ragdoll on me and fell on the floor and I had to call somebody to come help me pick her up.” Kathie has been at Brookdale for two years now.

Kathie does not remember much anymore, and speaks very little. So Bruce told their story as best he can remember it.

“Trouble is, I don’t know if I remember right,” he said. “You know, in a relationship you always help each other remember what happened and how it happened. But now it’s just my version and I’m not 100% sure it’s right.”

Bruce remembers that he started dating Kathie after his girlfriend at the time got married to someone not named Bruce. He’d met Kathie once before and his aunt suggested he go see her again.

He was living in Garrettsville at the time, and Kathie lived in the small burrough of Ford City, Pennsylvania, about 40 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. When he got to her house, he had a bit of a shock.

“I was number three. There was a queue. There were already two other guys there in her house who wanted to take her out,” he said. “She decided that day it would not be a good idea to go out with anybody. But she walked me out to my car and she said ‘Maybe if you’d like to come back next week I could go out with you.’ And 56 years later, here we are.”

Bruce and Kathie were married in 1968, just weeks after Bruce finished basic training in the Navy, and shortly after their wedding, he was shipped off to the Mediterranean on the Aircraft Carrier U.S.S. John F. Kennedy (CV-67). He had a brother in Vietnam, so the military did not want them deployed together. Instead, he worked to help defuse tensions in Jordan and Egypt.

“I did not want to go there, I hated it while I was doing it, but I was good at it, and I left the Navy as an E5,” he said.

During the first year of their marriage, Bruce and Kathie saw each other for a total of two months, he said. He would hitchhike home from Norfolk, Virginia to see her at her parents’ house, where she stayed.

After his four years in the Navy, they first found an apartment in Warren. Bruce worked at Packard Electric, becoming a general supervisor and stayed there for 30 years. After he retired, he took a part-time job on the Ohio Turnpike just to keep money coming in to pay taxes and buy Christmas presents. He retired fully after 13 years there.

Kathie had part-time jobs working at a Warren fish market, and then at a local McDonald’s as a shift manager.

“That was her first real job, making any real money,” he said. And he remembers what she spent it on.

“One day she came home driving a used convertible, and said ‘Well, waddaya think? I bought it,'” he said. “That car ended up costing me a lot more (in maintenance) but it made her happy, so what are you gonna do?”

Their son was born in 1973 and their daughter in 1975. In 1984, they bought a house in Mecca and that’s where they made the family home.

Their son now works as a computer technician for a pharmaceutical company and their daughter is a principal at a school in Lowellville. They also have three grandchildren.

Bruce said their son visits on the weekends, keeping up their 47-year tradition of having breakfast on Saturday and Sunday, and then they visit Kathie.

“Our daughter comes to visit when she can and brings the grandkids,” he said. “The grandkids are having a hard time with it, struggling with the fact that Gram doesn’t remember them anymore. So, I do the remembering for her.”

Bruce said much of what he remembers leaves him with regrets.

“The rest of the day when I’m at home, doing whatever I’m doing, all I think is ‘I wish, I wish, I wish. I wish I could’ve done this, I wish I would’ve said that.’ You always think, at least I do, if I’d treated her somehow differently, could I have staved this off somehow. I think I was an OK husband, but not great. And I would love to be able to tell her how bad I feel about that, but I can’t. So, I just tell her every day: ‘Try to remember that I love you and if you forget, I’ll remind you.'”

He tries to remind himself of the fun times, even if they remind him of some of his mistakes.

At Packard, Bruce often worked 10 to 14 hours a day, while Kathie was home with the kids.

“So, if I got some time off, I really didn’t want to go out anywhere and do stuff, and she really wanted us to go out and do something. So, that made for some issues.”

One day, as they were fighting about it in the kitchen, Bruce gave in, albeit begrudgingly, and it did not achieve the expected result.

“I told the kids go get in the car, and told Kathie ‘OK, let’s go shopping, we’ll go to the mall, we’ll spend the day out.’ At that point she says ‘No, I’m not going.'”

“I said ‘What do you mean you’re not going?'”

“I’m not going.”

“I said ‘Yes you are. You’re going and we’re going to have a good time.'”

“Nope.”

“I walked over, I picked her up, threw her over my shoulder, I carried her out the door (kicking and screaming, he added) and put her in the car and I said ‘Now stay. We’re gonna go and we’re gonna have a good time.'”

Bruce said Kathie calmed down about halfway to the mall and the day was a success.

“It was really stupid, but I’m so glad I did do it, because we did have a good time,” he said. “I was trying to fix a wrong, because I was wrong and she was right, and at the time that was the only way I knew how to do it. I look back now on so many things that maybe weren’t bad but I sure wish I’d done better. Because I can’t do anything now except the best I can.”

And so Bruce comes every day to Brookdale.

He takes comfort in seeing how peaceful Kathie is most of the time, compared to the struggles he sees other residents suffer through.

“She is very calm, she doesn’t get excited,” he said. “All I can really say is, she is a lovely person. Other people wave to her, she waves back and smiles.”

Kathie does struggle with eating and is on a puree diet. Eating seems to be a stresser for her, but all she says is “I am tired.”

While she can feed herself at times, she won’t eat more than a couple spoonfuls, so Bruce has to keep feeding her to make sure she gets the nourishment she needs.

Watching TV seems to quiet and calm her, and she does not complain of being tired then.

“Every day I tell her, ‘I’m gonna be your husband today, and oh by the way, we’ve been married 56 years. And usually she says ’56 years?!’ It’s a surprise every day.”

Some days, for Kathie, Bruce is her husband, and other days he’s the neighbor, and some days, he’s her father.

“I’ll take whatever I can get,” he said. “When I tell her it’s time for me to go, she says ‘OK.’ I’ll tell her ‘I hope you have a nice day,’ and she smiles and says ‘I hope you have a nice day.'”

Then he returns home, to clean the house, make home repairs, and handle bills. He’s kept company by Kathie’s two cats and the dog who Bruce says has become his therapist.

He thinks of Kathie all the time. He misses her cooking and the way they worked together to solve life’s problems, but some things leave him laughing.

“After 56 years, she’s got me trained,” he said. “I live alone now, but I go to the bathroom at 2 a.m., then I go back to bed and I think ‘I left the toilet seat up,’ so I get up, go back and put it down.”

There is no mistaking, though, that Kathie’s illness has taken a hard toll.

“This experience is a terrible experience to go through, but it has taught me how much I love her or how much I loved her and didn’t even know,” he said. “The saying is ‘you don’t know what you’ve got until you don’t have it anymore,’ and man is that right.”