Yolanda Spencer is eternally grateful for the weekly visits from fellow members of the Bethel AME Church in Jamaica Plain. Without them, she’s not sure how she would have survived the last eight years, since her husband Vincent, now 62, fell off a ladder and became a quadriplegic.

Grieving used to be seen as a very straightforward process: You cried at the funeral, were sad for a few months, then you had some “closure,” and got on with your life.

Psychologists — both pop and professional — thought that anyone who didn’t cry at the funeral or were still crying a year later was either heartless or overly emotional.

This is a love story – but one with the kind of anguished twist that millions of Americans must grapple with.

“Betsy, Betsy, Betsy, I love you,” Frederick “Pete” Peterson, now 84 and living in an assisted-living facility in Peabody, used to say, before Alzheimer’s disease slowly stole his brain.