The short wisps of gray hair are trimmed, combed and curled into pretty curves around her face.

The general looks up from his newspaper and smiles at his wife.

"Hey, beautiful," he says to the reflection in the mirror.

Her green eyes are vacant and she says nothing back.

Whether the general's wife thinks she's beautiful is a mystery.

Her hair is done the same way at the same salon every Saturday, whether she knows it or not. Her husband makes sure she looks as stylish as she always has, whether she realizes it or not.

It's just a haircut. But retired Lt. Gen. Bill Harrison, 72, made a promise long ago to keep up her appearance when her mind and her body would no longer do it for her.

So he is keeping that promise. There's not much else he can do.

Harrison, the 53rd commander of Fort Lewis and the first mayor of Lakewood, stepped down from the City Council in December to spend more time caring for his wife of 39 years.

Jo Harrison, 69, was diagnosed about four years ago with Lewy body disease, an illness similar to Alzheimer's. She suffers from dementia and can no longer walk or perform other basic functions on her own.

Professional caregivers help six days a week, and it's a full-time job.

But Saturdays are reserved for the Harrisons.

Saturdays are reminiscent of the old days when they cherished their time alone, away from the obligations of running Fort Lewis, he on the strategic end, she on the family-support side.

"My prayer right now is that (God) will have me healthy so I can continue to take care of her," he says.

There are occasional sparks of lucidity from the general's wife.

She'll turn to him out of the blue and say, "Shugga, I love you."

Surrounded by presents last December, she declared, "Merry Christmas."

While watching a television program with Army themes, she let out a mighty "Hooah!"

They are glimpses of the brassy, independent woman she once was.

Bill Harrison first spied Josie "Jo" Patton in 1959 as she was playing doubles tennis with Capt. Norman Schwarzkopf, who would later command U.S. forces during the Persian Gulf War.

They were at Fort Benning, Ga. Jo was a fourth-grade schoolteacher on post, and Bill was a captain attending a school for company-grade officers.

He saw the athletic blonde again at a Valentine's Day party he attended with another young woman, who wore a sorority shirt. He noticed Jo, got her phone number from a friend and asked her out.

"Are you sure Delta Zeta would approve?" she replied.

Their first date was to see the 1962 film "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," starring Glenn Ford, at a theater in Columbus, Ga.

Barbara Calvin, Jo's roommate at the time, remembers their girlfriend ritual: Before dates, they'd pick out clothes together. Afterward, they'd sit on Jo's bed and rehash the details. What the date looked like, where you went, whether you liked him or not.

Calvin said Jo dated a lot. She was effervescent - always smiling - and popular with young men.

But Jo knew Bill was special early on.

"She was fascinated with him," said Calvin, who now lives in Dallas. "His smarts, his bearing, the way he carried himself when he moved."

Bill and Jo dated on and off for several years, mainly because the young officer had cold feet about ending his bachelorhood.

But they found one another again after he served two back-to-back tours in Vietnam. They married in 1967 at a stone chapel at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

Jo Harrison loved her role as an Army wife: raising sons Bill and Charlie, hosting dinner parties at her various homes, finding ways to bridge the divide between stay-at-home moms and working wives, giving marital advice to women twice her age.

She never became upset or expressed regret when they had to move.

They lived everywhere from Germany to South Korea to San Francisco. When they were reassigned to Iran, she simply got out the "I" volume of the encyclopedia and learned everything she could.

They would live in nine states and three foreign countries. They settled in their final home in Lakewood in 1993.

Jo was the kind of woman who held military funerals for dozens of family pets, including Rocky the flying squirrel, who met his end by drowning in the toilet.

She was a woman of independent mind, who always worked and wasn't comfortable spending a man's money - at least early on.

She got over that later in their marriage. Bill remembers getting a call at work from his wife, who was wearing nothing but a new mink coat she knew she wasn't supposed to buy.

"Now you know I'm going to have to divorce you," he said.

"I'm going to make sure you don't have a dime left for the next young thing," she replied, laughing.

She was a woman with a sense of humor. At a large dinner, a top general once bemoaned that his luggage - including clean underwear - was lost in flight. She shrugged and said he should just turn what he was wearing inside out.

If there's one thing Bill Harrison admired about his wife, it's that she was real.

"She never tried to wear my stars," he says. "She was always just Jo Harrison."

FROM INDEPENDENCE TO DEMENTIA

Getting in the car is like a dance.

The general helps his wife out of her wheelchair, careful not to wreck her fresh curls, and shifts her weight so she leans on him a little. They rock back and forth, taking baby steps from the wheelchair to the brown Buick less than a foot away.

She wants to sit down but is too far from the seat. He coaxes her to continue balancing and shuffling until he can safely sit her down in the passenger seat.

The process takes about seven minutes, more than the drive home from the salon.

The illness wasn't always so debilitating, and she wasn't always this dependent. Rather, it was a slow descent laced with uncertainty. No one could predict what skills might fade from day to day.

"That was what frustrated her," he says. "Not knowing what was going to happen, when it was going to happen."

It started at work about six years ago. Jo, then 62, was an office manager for a physical therapist. She had what everyone thought to be an anxiety attack: She froze up, went home crying and took to bed. She assumed the stress of using new computer software had caused it.

The family doctor started running monthly tests on her motor and memory skills, and almost a year later called the couple in with bad news. He told Bill there were signs of neurological damage, maybe Alzheimer's.

Bill couldn't bear to tell his wife. He asked the physician to do it.

She held her husband's hand at the doctor's office and squeezed hard at the diagnosis.

She didn't cry until they got home. In private, they wept together.

It would be another year before her condition would be labeled Lewy body disease.

The illness played out in small ways at first. There were memory lapses, brief hallucinations. She paid the Oakbrook Country Club bill twice.

In late 2000, she announced her illness to the Lakewood Republican Women's Club, a group she headed for two years. She didn't want to hide her condition; some told her it was a bold move.

She could walk on her own at first. Then she needed more help and would exercise by walking around the block holding onto an Albertsons shopping cart. The Harrisons joked she was the bag lady of the Oakbrook neighborhood.

Now she uses a wheelchair and rarely leaves the house, except to go to the salon, the dentist and Madigan Army Medical Center if something's wrong.

They used to go out to dinner, first in the open, and later in a more private spot where Bill could feed her without eyes following.

Now it's too difficult.

Sometimes she recognizes people; sometimes she doesn't. Sometimes her words make sense; most of the time they don't.

Some encouraged Bill to move Jo into a retirement or nursing home, but he felt she'd be better off living at home where everything was familiar. There's a picture of her mother by the bed, the first thing she sees when she awakens.

The hardest was the day Bill had to take away her car keys. The doctor said it was no longer safe for her to drive, and she "just went to pieces," Bill says.

Family friend Gwen Young, 63, recalls when Jo was well and flitted around the city in her green 1975 Triumph TR6 convertible. Young still remembers a day about six years ago when her friend surprised her at work and took her for a ride with the top down.

"Anything you did with her was fun," Young says.

The transfer of keys hurt Bill as much as it hurt his wife.

"It was a major loss of independence and freedom," he says.

FROM COMMANDER TO CAREGIVER

There is no door on the bathroom in the foyer of the Harrison house.

A door is just a roadblock to a wheelchair, an encumbrance to the caregiver.

The general wheels his wife to the bathroom and lifts her, similar to the way he got her into the car.

His lilting voice coaches her along. Back up. Sit down. Good girl, you're doing really good.

"She took care of me for so many years, not like this but in other ways, and she took care of my boys," he says. "I'm going to do this as long as I can."

Bill Harrison served as briefer for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and assembled the 7th Infantry Division (Light) at Fort Ord, Calif. He was commanding general for I Corps and Fort Lewis for two years.

After retiring from the Army, he returned to the South Sound area and helped found the City of Lakewood in 1996. He served eight years as its first mayor.

Now he spends his Saturday in the foyer feeding his wife bites of salad, cake, cornbread and seafood casserole prepared by a friend. He washes the dishes with orchestral renditions of Beatles hits blaring in the background. She watches a football game on mute downstairs.

The routine is painstaking. He clears Saturdays of big chores because this is a full-time job. He used to get upset when he would try to do paperwork or fix something and wouldn't be able to finish.

Before Jo got sick, he'd get aggravated if something were lost or broken in the house. Now that's all just stuff, and stuff can be replaced.

Retired Col. Carroll Dickson has known Bill since 1968 and served as second in command under the general at Fort Lewis. Dickson remembers his boss as a model officer, always focused on his men and exuding authority.

"When we were in the Army together, his first priority was the soldiers," Dickson says. "Today he has this same focus on Jo.

"He has become a lot more introspective."

Bill says her illness has made him a better person.

Their younger son, Charlie Harrison, 35, agrees.

People always told Charlie he should be proud of his father the officer, his father the general, his father the mayor.

"But to me the most impressive thing is what he's done and his love for his wife, my mom," he says. "A lot of people don't do this."

The general doesn't like to give advice. He says he's not qualified, that it's not his role to tell people how to live their lives.

But he remembers a vacation he and Jo always intended to take. They kept saying for years they would drive across the United States, stopping at military installations along the way. His secretary even planned the itinerary.

The Harrisons never got around to it.

"Whatever it is, do it while you can," he says. "Because you never know."

FROM BUSY DAYS TO LONELY NIGHTS

By the time he gets her to bed in the early evening, he'll be beat. They sleep in adjoining bedrooms, she in a hospital bed facing the patio and the garden.

It's hard to get used to sleeping alone after 39 years, without the familiar body nearby, without her cold feet pressed against his back for warmth.

He doesn't know if she misses being with him. He does know she's sad if he's not there to say good night. It's one reason he stepped down from the Lakewood City Council, whose meetings stretched well past her bedtime.

He thinks about what it will be like when she's gone. The doctors don't know how long she has to live.

There's some dignity in death ending an illness. He imagines the old Jo Harrison would not like to see her sick self, would not be happy that he must care for her. He says Jo, a devout Christian, would say a slow or a quick death is God's decision.

He also knows he'd miss having her to talk to and sit with, whether she's the old Jo or not. She has always been his best friend.

Out of nowhere, his wife announces a stream of garbled words and phrases.

"Really. Why, I didn't know that," Bill responds, shaking his head. "Why didn't you tell me that before?"

She seems to ponder his question for a minute.

"All the other people already knew," she says.

"Well that figures. I always am the last to know," he says.

They both laugh.

"I miss her," he says. "She's in her own world, and I can't go in."