After So Much Time

Yesterday as I was driving in my car, I thought, "I miss my husband." And I do. I miss you. Dang it. Darn it. Rats! You were horrible to me in the end. Your meds weren't working and you thought I was interested in another man, which wasn't true, but you had that in your mind, and you were going to show me. You were going to hurt me as much as you could. You thought I was waiting for you to die so I could go off with someone else. But I wasn't. You were being robbed of your life but I wasn't being robbed of mine. Carmi and I were the only ones you honestly told that the divorce was your idea. To everyone else, even your best friend, you said I was divorcing you because you had cancer. To Carmi and me you said you were asking for a divorce because I wouldn't let you gamble without some kind of assurance I would be protected. But after all the awful things that happened, I have these days when I just wish we could be together again. It isn't only the lovemaking I miss, it's the companionship, the talking, your sense of humor, your wit and your zest for life. I miss you, and I wish I didn't. And, oh, how I wish it had ended differently. Wherever your soul has gone, I feel I won't see or feel your spirit again. I miss the essence that is you and must mourn you now along with lots of both ugly and beautiful memories. Now my father has died. You and he, the two men in my life, are gone. I am strong for having been loved by the two of you, but I am weak with loss. It is double now. You died on September 2, and Dad on November 17. It's bitter, it's freeing, it's exhausting, it's sad. My life has been turned upside down in the last twelve weeks, and twenty-seven months before that it was turned upside down, and eight months before that it was turned upside down. And now you are both gone. My life lies before me and I have relatively no plan for myself. You are both gone and I am very much here.

Messy

So much about you was messy. You were disorganized. You lost paperwork and receipts. You didn't clean up after yourself. You didn't pay attention to details. You skipped steps and cut corners. You gambled and lost money. No, you gambled and squandered money. All the boxes the judge ordered me to pack and ship to you were in your garage. You had gone through them and shifted some stuff around. Your apartment was strewn with who-knows-what. It was chaotic. Packing your place was a challenge. Cleaning your place was a challenge. It took weeks. It was unpleasant. It was confusing. We are now tired. We are mentally and physically exhausted. Your things are, once again, in the driveway. We will have a sale. We will sell things on the internet. We sold things in the desert. We gave things to your neighbors for having helped us load the rented moving truck. We will sell them in the yard. You had been on buying sprees. You had made tens of thousands of dollars vanish. You have bills, unpaid bills. You had let your auto insurance lapse. I am getting your bills now. I am making payments. I am calling. Kyle is calling. We are finalizing things. It's messy. Messy, messy, messy.

6 weeks

You've been gone for almost six weeks now. I didn't know you had made me the executor of your estate---although it didn't surprise me---but I didn't expect for you to have made me the beneficiary of your estate as well. Also, the will you had made had been written before our mediation, the mediation you had so wanted, the mediation you had said was what we should have done from the beginning, the mediation where you gave away your entitlement to my retirement plan. The will didn't mesh with what was in the final divorce settlement. In it you gave the lion's share of 'your' entitlement to my pension plan to cancer foundations. How sad for your daughter and how fortunate that it didn't come to fruition. How sad that she had to read that you would give what you thought was over a million dollars to cancer institutes and something like twenty thousand to her. Fortunately your delusional thinking was, once again, inaccurate. You can't measure and collect your portion of a pension plan by what it would hypothetically pay off over any number of years. It can only be calculated against the existing dollar amount in that plan on the date of separation. What a jerk! Was a selfish, uninformed jerk!

The First Day of School

It would have been the first day of my last year teaching school, the last year at the school where I had spent my professional life, at the job that had provided for our family for decades, had given us health and dental insurance, had allowed me to push myself as a learner and as a professional, a place where I had made friends and instructed at least a thousand children. It was on this day we got a call. You had been in the hospital for two weeks, your kidneys and liver were breaking down and you were being put on hospice. You had a woman there, someone who had been smitten by you, someone who was at your side the entire time. In addition, she was comfortably set and was a former nurse. How convenient for you. I remember that while you were still with me and I had received a 1099 in the mail from a casino, I had asked you to look around the poker table the next time you were there and figure out which one of those people was going to be giving you your morphine shots when your time came. How I had underestimated you! You were never one to see limitations. You knew you would be more resourceful than that. You knew you would be able to find someone to care for you and that you would have other places to look than in a casino. As soon as you moved to the desert, you joined a cancer support club and there she was----WHAM!---newly-widowed, very, very lonely and very, very vulnerable. You had no worries about missing me and my caregiving or anything else, I could then just become a target for your greed. She was much more qualified for this job than I could have ever been. Maybe she was a step up. On your release from the hospital, you were being sent to her home. She had cleared out a bedroom for you. She and the hospice nurses would take care of you but you were not being told you were being put on hospice. Laura called me and asked if I could watch the baby. When she arrived at the house she told me the news. I cried. She cried. Kyle looked confused.

Christmas 2011

It is Christmas. You don't like Christmas. In fact, the more I wanted to celebrate, the more you disliked it. There were times when I felt you didn't want to do Christmas at all. I think it is somewhat natural for people become less and less interested in it as they get older. Maybe it's their children leaving home and the excitement of children in the house diminishing. Maybe it's fatigue with the whole thing. Maybe it's feeling manipulated by retailers and a materialistic society. Whatever the case was with you, you didn't enjoy it. I can imagine you spent this day gambling if you are feeling well, or watching TV if you are feeling ill.

I woke at 6:20 this morning and decided it was not acceptable to be awake that early on Christmas. I pulled a pillow over my head, rolled over, and went back to sleep. Then I started to have a dream about you. In it you had been in some kind of care facility. It didn't look like a hospital; it looked more like a stately old home with many bedrooms. You were being discharged. You looked sweet and vulnerable, like the person you are when you are on your best behavior. I was there. But you weren't going home with me. You were going home with another woman. She was prettier, more energetic and had a better personality than I. She and I chatted. She was very nice. I could see why you would want to go with her rather than with me.

Suddenly Carmi was there, and it was not you who was being released, but my dad. Carmi was going home with us. You had already gone home with that other woman.

Then the dream ended and I awoke feeling sad, lonely, abandoned, rejected, and isolated. Why did I have this dream on Christmas? Who was that other woman? Was she your gambling addiction? Is she better equipped to take care of you than I? Why did I feel so unempowered in the dream? There is a part of me that's confused about why you chose a divorce after we had been together for so long. Because you had chosen divorce over protecting me, I have a sad person inside of me who feels rejected.

Memorial

You have been very ill for about a month now. Next week you'll turn 66. Last year you went on Medicare and it has been a magic bullet for you. It has enabled you to seek and receive medical treatment anywhere you want. You have gone to virtually every medical facility in your area. And here too. You have just spent several days in the hospital. They tried some procedures to stop your internal bleeding. Did they succeed? I don't know. But you are alive and, as far as I know, you are winning the battle against pancreatic cancer.

I DO know that my friend and colleague doesn't have the same access to medical care but has been resourceful in getting into medical trials and experimental treatments. She has valiantly battled her cancer off and on for the past seven years. This week she turned 45 and it was probably her last birthday. The day before the doctors told her the last PET scan was not good. It showed her tumors multiplying and growing at an alarming rate. She began a new treatment, a trial, but they say she doesn't have the time left. This treatment takes several months to build up in the body and do its magic. She doesn't have the luxury of time required. They say she is dying. I say, "Unacceptable!"

I DO know that my lovely friend's good, kind, generous and altruistic husband left this earth last week, a victim of metastatic cancer, being mercifully granted a peaceful death, not the usual death of a cancer patient, drowning in watery lungs. He had ushered so many people out of this world in his work with hospice, God must have granted him mercy. He deserved it. He asked for a hamburger, fell to sleep, and died without suffering. But he was a good man who had dedicated the last fifteen years or so of his life to serving others and treating the homeless and the terminally ill. He didn't have access to much medical care. He had one choice: Kaiser. He couldn't go elsewhere. He took their one-size-fits-all treatment. It metastasized. He died. He was remembered fondly at the service this week. What a loss. Unacceptable.

Bleeding

Laura and Kyle are being attentive to you. Even though you live over 100 miles away, those sweet kids are driving out and spending time with you, running your errands, cleaning your house, washing your sheets. You live in a large place but you don't like it there. You want a settlement with me so you can buy yourself a nice house with a view. I'd like a nice house with a view too.

You need blood transfusions. There's blood in your stools. You are very weak and you can't hold down much of the food you eat. You had asked if we could take care of the dogs for a couple of days while you go to the hospital and get some tests to try and figure out the source of your bleeding. You were going to bring the dogs by on Monday. On Sunday evening you called Kyle. You said you were too weak to drive yourself in to town. Would he come out on a bus in the morning and drive you in? He's a good guy; he said yes.

Kyle and Laura left the house around six. She drove him downtown. He had to be at the station an hour before his bus left. He got out to the desert at 11:00. Where were you? You had gone to the hospital out there to get a transfusion. You would be picking him up at about two or three in the afternoon. Laura said no. He wasn't going to go running out there to help you and then sit around and wait four hours for you to pick him up. The whole 'dropping of everything' ' rushing out to accommodate you' which in a normal person's world would be a big effort, one that would be appreciated by most of the rest of the world, was staying true to your form. You ask someone to make a sacrifice for you and then you act like they should make countless more accommodations for you without batting an eye. You had a friend pick up Kyle and take him to your place. He ran your errands for you and then picked you up at the hospital. You were tired. I hear that getting a transfusion can be exhausting. You came home and fell asleep immediately. Then you started telling Kyle that you didn't want to drive back here. You had changed your appointment with the hospital here. You were coming in on Tuesday now. You wanted to stay out in the desert overnight and then drive in early in the morning. What part of 'traffic' do you not understand? Laura reacted very intensely to that. She got on the horn with Kyle and told him this was a pattern of yours. Ask for big favors and, once they have started, just ask for more and more. There was a time when that felt like spontaneity to me. I loved it; it fed into my sense of adventure. But after a while it becomes an inconvenience. There were so many times I had other plans that would be interrupted by this capriciousness. It got old.

You and Kyle came in late that night. You had gotten the picture from Laura. She didn't like your behavior and she wasn't going to let her boyfriend get sucked into it. We got the dogs. You stayed at David's. You went to the hospital here. They said---or you said they said-----that you have some kind of bleeding that will heal itself in a couple of months. In the meantime you'll be weak and you'll need blood transfusions. You stayed for three more days. On Thursday we had a deposition in your attorney's office. It was a long day. It was mentally exhausting. You took Laura out to dinner that night.

You are thin, you are weak, your body is not cooperating with you. You called Kyle and asked if we could keep the dogs for another week. You have some 'medical issues'. I'm worried you are dying and your body is disintegrating from the inside out. I'm worried that the tumor is still so large that it is continuing to choke the superior mesenteric artery thus cutting some of the blood supply to your intestines. Again, I am sorry you chose divorce. It would be terribly unpleasant to live with you while you are suffering so, but I would have done it. I told Kyle I was wondering if you were feeling despondent and suicidal. You came by to say goodbye to the dogs yesterday. I asked Kyle if he noticed any finality in that. Are you going to take your life? You said you would if you found yourself dying and in great pain.