Text by John Penney/The Day

Inside her Gorton Street home on a recent weekday, Lynn Konieki beamed with delight as she shuffled through music and cat videos on her phone.

As a languid version of “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)” played, the 65-year Konieki mouthed the words from her living room bed as husband Steve Batte looked on patiently.

In the middle of the song, Batte, 69, picked a stick of deodorant up off a nearby table and asked Konieki what it was.

No response beyond a smile and an anecdote about her brother.

Batte next asked his wife, her thin frame clad in a loose shirt and sweatpants, to identify a portable fan.

Again, a grin was her answer.

Konieki in February 2022 was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, or FTD — the same disease actor Bruce Willis suffers from — a particularly insidious disorder in which abnormal proteins accumulate in a victim’s frontal and temporal brain lobes causing drastic behavioral, speech and other cognitive changes.

There is no cure.

“She’s lost most of her nouns — things like ‘onion’ or ‘bird’ — and, as of a couple months ago no longer remembers her own birthday or who the president is,” Batte said. “But she still gets up at 4 a.m. and makes coffee and can add up the bills in my wallet.”

Batte said he thinks his wife still knows they’re married, though where there was once intimacy, only affection remains.

"Her concept of marriage is different now," he said.

Batte said he has no illusions about his wife’s future, one that soon will likely include a full loss of mobility and a deeper untethering from reality. He likens the struggles of FTD families to those whose loved ones went missing in war.

“The term I learned was ambiguous loss, the hope that a person may come back,” he said. “Lynn, the person I know, is right here. But she is gradually disappearing.”