THE DAY MY WIFE COULD NO LONGER DRAW TIME. by Michael Whelan There are moments in a marriage when your heart breaks without making a sound. Mine broke in May of 2025, watching my beloved Rebecca attempt to draw a clock. After decades together, I knew her intelligence, wit, extraordinary memory, and beautiful mind. Like me, she loved crossword puzzles. And she was damn good at them. Then Parkinson's disease began its merciless invasion. During a Montreal Cognitive Assessment, our physician handed Rebecca paper and asked her to draw a clock, complete with numbers and hands. What she drew was unrecognizable. I stared at the page, desperately searching for something familiar. Anything resembling an object we'd seen thousands of times. There was nothing. My heart shattered. Then came another exercise. Connect the numbers sequentially. One to two. Two to three. Three to four. She couldn't. Not even close. Once, Rebecca could follow the twisting pathways of a crossword clue, teasing meaning from a handful of letters. Now a few numbers refused to find their places. It was as though someone had removed the bridges between thoughts, leaving words and memories stranded on distant shores. Names escaped her. Familiar words disappeared. Simple instructions became bewildering puzzles. I watched the woman who had organized our lives with effortless intelligence struggle to organize twelve numbers on a page. The doctor could score her mistakes, but no test could measure the woman behind them: her laughter, her kindness, the tenderness with which she loved every living creature. That page documented what Parkinson's had taken. It couldn't record what remained. Drawing a clock requires memory, spatial awareness, planning, reasoning, and executive functioning. Parkinson's-related cognitive impairment can disrupt those connections. Rebecca might have known perfectly well what a clock was, yet her brain could no longer coordinate the processes necessary to reproduce one. Her intelligence hadn't necessarily vanished. Her ability to express what she knew was slipping away. Imagine knowing someone's breathing, understanding their silences, recognizing their laughter across a crowded room, yet being unable to enter the confusion unfolding inside their mind. For years, we measured our lives in birthdays, anniversaries, ordinary Tuesdays, and beautiful hours together. Now she couldn't draw the instrument that measured them. The examination lasted minutes. The following March, my beautiful Rebecca was gone. But I still remember that May afternoon, the paper, and the terrible helplessness of watching her struggle. Perhaps Parkinson's cruelest betrayal is that it forces you to witness each disappearance while leaving your own memory painfully intact. The clock remained on the page, broken and silent, its numbers wandering like frightened children through a world that no longer made sense. I wanted to gather every lost number back into place. To lend Rebecca my hands, my memory, my certainty, anything that might guide her home. But love could not cross that distance. The woman who had shared my life was still there, looking at me with eyes I knew better than my own, while invisible darkness rearranged the rooms of her mind. Time had once been our companion. That afternoon, it became an executioner. She could no longer draw a clock. I could not stop watching our precious time run out.