Thank you for the responses above.

Caring for him is about the only contribution I make in this world. I got on SSDI a few years ago (based on chronically recurring depression with anxiety,) so I don't work. I don't have kids and grandkids to focus on. A lot of the time, I feel I do a good job of looking after him, and that gives me a sense of purpose and accomplishment. I like having someone to love and care for. But he's never, ever, ever going to be a source of what I would need from him to make ours a relationship that builds me up. He doesn't know enough to even want to be. It's just beyond him and probably not even his fault that he lacks some of the basic capacities that distinguish grown-ups from children. It's like I adopted a handicapped child . . . even long before the dementia. Years ago, shortly after I became deeply involved with him, one of his adult children asked me. "How do you like baby-sitting?"

Thirteen years ago, a counselor on a crisis phone line sent cops to my house to take a loaded gun from me. I went into a partial hospitalization program where the psychiatrist running it said I was a narcissist who fed off of male attention. She said she wondered how my boyfriend put up with me. (I had told her that I had sought relationships with other men.) A year later was when I cut myself. I despaired of there being any help for me.

This juncture does feel like a crossroads for me. I don't want to go down either of the roads. I want to dig down and crawl into the ground underneath me.

I haven't slept in well over 24 hours. Long periods of insomnia keep happening to me. I wish I could fall asleep forever. Often my thoughts make me wish I could die to escape them. I used to feel very accepted and wanted by him. Not any more. I feel like I'm just here to take out the trash, give him his meals, drive him to medical appointments, change the TV station, etc.

If I sleep all the rest of this day, I don't care. If I don't even visit him in the hospital today, I don't care.