Two years. It seems so long now, yet
it could have been yesterday. Time is like that…
Do you miss us, Chris?
That question recently filled my
mind without warning. Two years is a long time… If he had been on a business
trip for two years, he would certainly miss us. Obviously. But this gone
is not that kind of being away. Still, in that moment I was gutted thinking of
him wanting to be with us for two whole years.
Do you miss everything?
This thought right on top of the
last left me swallowing sobs. He must long for everything – driving the kids to
school, finding an ELT feature, Christmas, coffee, clean sheet night, hugs. Everything.
Every little thing.
He doesn’t exist to miss any
person or thing. He won’t exist ever again. He is gone.
This was the worst of the trio of
thoughts. Chris is gone, vanished into the universe. He cannot think or feel, he
does not exist to miss us or our life together. It still doesn’t make sense. I
wonder if it ever will. He is gone.
A widowed friend helped me a
great deal on this day. I’m paraphrasing, but my friend explained that our dead
loved ones are most certainly fine, that the hard part is here. Death relieves their
suffering, comforts their grief, removes their longing. Whatever your belief
structure is regarding what comes next, they are okay because all struggle is finished.
The hard part is here.
Chris certainly did have a hard part
before his passing. I recall in painful detail the physical decline that he
suffered and, even more agonizing, his deep grief at leaving. Oh, he loved
those kids. Me. Family. This entire life. Years of anticipation of the tumor
coming back gave way to a terrible and terrifying reality that it was going to
take him. Chris would miss out on so much, too soon.
In the last four weeks or so, word-finding
was more challenging and the right words wouldn’t always come in the exact way
he intended. We didn’t talk about his grief in detail. I don’t know if we would
have had the tumor not impacted his speech center; because his pain was so deep,
so personal, and so uniquely his, I’m not sure he would have chosen to share if
he could have. I remember Chris struggling to eat a few bites and needing to
leave the table when overcome with tears. I felt so helpless. All I could do was
wheel him away to the privacy he wanted.
Yes, he had an extremely hard
stretch before his death. Chris missed us while he was still here. He missed
the older versions of the kids, the older versions of us. He missed the freedom
of full ability, he longed for a future. It was terribly hard for Chris to give
it all up because he loved it all so much, but he had no choice.
On his last day, Chris couldn’t
speak. Not so much because of the tumor but from being weak. He seemed to cling
to consciousness and life. For the last hours he was awake, Chris was calm and it
was just the two of us. At one point, he channeled his energy into a few deliberate
winks while holding full eye contact with me. He had worried he would not be
able to communicate at some point in his disease and he had spoken about
finding a way to make sure we would know what he wanted to say. It came to pass
in that moment, Chris was earnestly communicating his final message to me.
While nobody can be completely sure what another person is thinking, seventeen
years in a relationship together give me high confidence that Chris was telling
me two things.
It is OK.
I love you.
Even though it is excruciating to
remember the end, I revisit this memory and every single time I feel certain that Chris was using his last energy to reassure me, just as he always did. He
was going to be okay. I was going to be okay. He loved me. He loved our family.
So yes. The hard part is here. Chris’s
hard part while he was here is done now; he is permanently at peace. He is not
missing us nor is he longing to come back. He is gone, but he is okay.
My hard part goes on because I am
still here, still missing him, reliving the trauma of his illness and decline, wishing I could have done more for him, longing for him to come back, loving him in his absence.
It is not the same difficult path that Chris walked, but it is hard to wake up every
day without his living presence, without his kind, alive eyes telegraphing real-time
reassurance and love. I don’t feel particularly “okay” right now, but I hope
that one day I’ll be more stable in feeling better while still living. Chris wanted
that for me. He believed I could get to okay, so I will keep trying for him.
The hard part is here. He is OK. I
still love him, we all do.
Two years.
