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It has been 25 years since Alzheimer's began taking hold of Muriel McQuilkin, wife of Robertson McQuilkin, president of Columbia Bible College and its graduate school. As the disease progressed, in 1990, McQuilkin resigned to care for his wife full time. She stopped recognizing him in 1993. At Christianity Today's invitation, McQuilkin wrote two articles about his decision and caring for his wife ("Living by Vows," CT, October 8, 1990, and "Muriel's Blessing," CT, Feb. 5, 1996. On September 20, 2003, Muriel McQuilkin died at the age of 81.

Stan Guthrie, CT's associate news editor, was a graduate student at the school when McQuilkin announced his resignation. Guthrie interviewed McQuilkin, 76, shortly after Muriel's death.

What was your daily routine like, especially toward the end?

I would fix breakfast and then go in and turn on the lights, and she would awaken, although in the last year or two she didn't open her eyes much. Usually in the morning she would open her eyes and then I would feed her. And then of course, after that I had to change and clean her up. If it was nice weather, I would put her in the wheel chair and take her out into the yard for her to sit out there for two or three or four hours. Then lunch. She had to be changed every four hours.

She had excellent health, so I usually had about six hours a day of quiet to do my own writing and business and so forth.

In the evening we would again have supper, and after supper about 9:00 I'd start working on the bedtime routine.

But last summer she began to choke on the food.

It must have been difficult to care for her at that level, almost as if she were a newborn again.

Well, she was not burdensome. She was always lovable and accepted my ministrations, for the most part. She was low maintenance.

Some people sort of resent the imposition, but those thoughts never came to me. I thought it was a privilege to care for her. She had always cared for me. So it was not a burden. In fact, if it had been a burden, maybe there wouldn't be so much grief now, that sense of loss.

I assume you were even grieving while she was alive. Did that process take away any of the grieving that you're feeling now?

I don't see how I could have any more grief. Actually, 25 years, that is so gradual, so incremental that there wasn't time to think about [grieving her loss]. My memories were all happy memories. I'd review them to her as long as she had any consciousness. I really even chatted to her after she wasn't aware of anything.

My children, who all live at a distance, all said that they grieved her loss way back at the beginning, when she no longer knew them. But I never went through that kind of process.

How aware of you was she?

She lost that 10 years ago.

What surprised you during the time of caring for her?

Everything. You don't know what's coming next, but you're not surprised that something is next. I didn't try to predict whether when she died I was going to greatly grieve or I wasn't going to greatly grieve or whether I was going to feel this or that.I still don't know what I feel. The churning of emotions, just grief, is all I can call it.

What did this experience teach you about the Christian life? You've written a book on Christian ethics and have had to apply a lot of it.

Since I've tried to base my life on bringing my choices under the authority of Scripture, and I made the decision early on that it was non-negotiable, I didn't really have struggles about what to do. As I told the students when I resigned from school, this was one of the easiest decisions I ever made.

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February 2004, Vol. 48, No. 2