Perhaps over time I will be able to put this little ball of grief somewhere, store it in a grief drawer or bury it in my back yard with my phlox and roses and dahlias. Maybe there, the grief will lie in hope that it will grow into something, perhaps even into joy.
The last straw, as they say, was smoking in the rain during blizzards, snow blowing in your face as you puff away at that little white stick. I mean, how ridiculous right?
Knock on wood, so far there has not been a ‘what next’ in at least a month. So we are more than grateful for that. He saw his surgeon recently and he took an x-ray of my husband’s lungs – it was an all-clear. He saw his oncologist too and will not see him again until October.
Cancer treatments have come a long way, or so I am told. I am not so sure this is true. I see a tremendous difference in my husband’s energy level and in his strength. It used to be me that was always trying to catch up to him, but not anymore.
I sure wasn’t ready for that, just as I am sure most people aren’t ready for this kind of thing to happen. Nobody prepares for these things, they just sort of happen. One day life is normal and one day it isn’t.
Well, when gifts were finally being opened this particular Christmas, I came across a huge box under the tree for me. All I could think was maybe my parents bought me the stereo I had been dreaming about!
When I would visit her when she lived in Ottawa, she would take me to parties – parties in restaurants. I felt like a celebrity, because for me it was only celebrities that partied in restaurants. The people at these parties were different too. They had foreign-sounding names and talked with accents – German and British.
They had expanded several sizes, along with the rest of me. I was no longer the young, thin curvaceous chick. It seemed my body was going through yet another drastic change. Having had two children by this time, I realized something had to be done with all the weight I carried in front of me.
Those blankets I can safely say protected me from those nasty, scary things who perched themselves in my imagination and spent nights haunting me.
The technology of today, our medicine, have left us struggling with decisions that years ago we would not even have to think about. Our elderly parents would have died in their sleep in their own beds — no fanfare, no ambulances, no needles, no poking or prodding. Just old-fashioned death at your door, and he would come for you only once.
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