Tomorrow at noon it will be four years since my Linda breathed out her last breath in my arms. Four years since Casper told me I could turn off the O2 concentrator- "she doesn't need it anymore- it's not helping now." Four years since the hospital bed was in our living room and was piled full with Kerry and Chloe and Charity and Kelsey and Trevor and Fuzzy and Babbles, and since I tried to pat each head and keep an eye on each one as I watched the life drain from Linda after more than two decades of loving each other.
It was Good Friday. She was dying. She did movie trivia at 6 am. Typical Linda, always remembering more than any of us would ever know. At 8am she was asleep. Shortly after she was unconscious. I panicked. We had a nurse there with us, but I wanted Casper. She was my touchstone. She promised Linda she would be there at the end. I needed that to be true. I used her personal number. The "don't use this unless it's really an emergency" number. She answered. She had a busy day. I described what I was seeing. I knew what I was seeing. I used to be a hospice social worker. I suddenly wanted to be in denial and not know what we in front of me. After all the days before of thinking it was the end, this time it really was. I can talk a good game. I can look brave. But when my wife is dying, really truly dying, it is so absolutely not okay.
I took off the oxygen mask. I turned off the O2 concentrator. It was suddenly quiet after years of that noise. The house was full of people. All I could hear was that the concentrator was off. Two hours of struggle later, it was over. I knew she was gone an hour before. My hospice training kicked in. The exhaustion kicked my butt. My back hurt. I wanted privacy. I had a crowd, and kids, and pets, and my wife was dead. The whole time in those last hours it was Casper whose eyes I looked at. Every time I looked up she was staring intently at me. I asked later and she said she was just checking to make sure I wasn't decompensating with all the kids and activity/ But her eyes, those intense baby blues, were locked on and calmed me down. It was "everything is going to be okay. We talked about this. It's okay." She called our doc and he escalated meds. The pump flowed faster. Linda has no pain, no discomfort despite dying from pulmonary fibrosis, one of the most evil diseases ever. She never felt short of breath. I knew I had kept my promise, and she went home, just as she wanted. She could not fight any further. She'd said her goodbyes. Every child had been given a Mama or an Aunt Linda moment. We'd hugged and held one another in her hospital bed, and said our final goodbyes.
And yet... who can ever, ever be ready for their beloved spouse to die? I can tell you form where I sit- absolutely nobody. No matter the age, the cause, the relationship. It's never okay. It is survivable. But it's not okay.
As I type this Casper's birds are asking for attention. Linda's kitties are too. I am finding that after four short years, years that feel like weeks to me, I am having to introduce Linda to people in my planet who never knew her. I'm explaining our kids adoption days; vacations; how we met; how she dies- the really important stuff that makes you who you are, who you were, how life was- all of that is now my memory and I have to make her come alive. When I say she was my Peter Pan someone may not know she had a grin that lit up a room. They don't have my vision of her on the dock in Catalina on our honeymoon where she was bent at the waist and smiling ear to ear in her overall shorts. They don't know she would do just about anything to have fun. My new grandbaby will never know that Mama Linda would have been the ultimate Tickle Monster with a grandchild and the most adoring grandma a baby could ever ask for.
Four years, and it feel;s like she's being erased. ever so slowly, from the present.
I sign her name to cards. I do flowers at church in her memory. I talk about her. sometimes to the discomfort of others. I know it's a little weird to some of you that I have been widowed twice now. That I married her nurse. That she died too. That Linda and Casper are mourned equally, in different ways, even though Linda had more time with me. When I miss one, I miss both. The loss of one is the loss of being loved, completely and totally and absolutely. That's not a complaint. Few people have been loved as I have even once in their lives. I have twice. And yet as I approach tomorrow, my thoughts are on the incredible loss of that love. The pain of that last breath. Not for her- for me.
Tomorrow I have to show up for work.. Sit through a meeting. Sound like I am listening. Where will I be? In my other universe- the one four years ago. Wishing that they were both still here. There is no way I would have made it through that day without Casper looking directly at me. There is no way I could have let her body be taken away without trusting that she would be respected and protected.
And now, four years later, I will spend time tomorrow with both of them, in theonly place that is safe and quiet and that has a place for them. I'll have yet another chat. I'll tell them both that this is really unfair to all of us. That our meeting has to be a cemetery. And then at some point later this week I will swing back into the here ad now and real life, and begin having to explain again who they were, how much I miss Linda, how yes, I miss Casper just as much, and that no, I am not toxic and do not kill people. I will smile at the stupid jokes, and keep my chin up. And then, at night, the tears will come as they are tonight. Because no matter how ready, no matter how terrible the disease, it is never, ever okay for your wife to die. Ever. And you never get over it.
But you do keep on living. And smiling. Because that's what we do.
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