Dear Nancy I am sorry to hear about the loss of your boyfriend . He certainly sounds like an creative communicator! You pose an inetresting question to which of course I can only suggest a couple of possible answers. The first thing is that it may be that using gesture and pointing was part of his own individulalstyle of communictaing. Many people use a lot of non verbal communication as a stylistic device during converstaion to add colour , richness and emphasis to what they are saying. Gesture is also very useful in conversation when there is a word finding difficulty. Sometimes it is hard to retrieve a specific word or name and pointing will come to our rescue. This type of difficulty which has also been described as an anomia may also happen as a consequence of even very mild injury to the brain, or a mild loss of oxygen. Though I do not have the details about your late boyfriend’s lung disaese, if this was a chronic condition and affected his oxyegn levels, it may have cause a slight diffculty in the part of the brain responsible for the retrieval of such words and directions. That part of the brain (at the junction of the parietal and temporal lobe) is very suscpetible to periods of anoxia.
This of course is only a guess, but it sounds as though you and he had very good ways around his problem and that indeed he should be remebered for his unique communication style!!
Best wishes
Claire Penn