I must write about Love, because I will go fucking insane if I write of the painful past, I will go fucking insane from..I don’t know…rage? World stopping anxiety? Despair?
It goes by many names, this feeling that is the experience I shared with Chuck in his hospice time. In the cancer time. In his death and dying time.
How I torture myself by reading the blogs I wrote on my private page, of those times.
The horrifying morning where I drove Chuck to the ER because this man who had a massively high pain threshold could no longer absorb the pain of the cancer that returned and ate his ribs, and made it difficult to walk.
The determination of me, of our kids, to make his hospice time one of Love, not instead of fear, but as a cup for the fear.
The horror of realizing that my beloved husband was dying and I couldn’t stop it.
And the sharp in breath I took when I recognized, somehow, that the breath he was taking at that moment, would be his last breath.
The…everything…as I put my hand on his heart and knew that he was gone.
And that my entire life was somehow, also…gone.
My god, the dread, the panic, the purity of that moment of sheer Hiroshima level shock…
I must focus on the Love. Or go more fucking insane than any person since time began.
The Love.
His Love for me, and mine for him.
Chuck was my life, and I, his.
With kids and siblings and parents and friends we loved deeply…still, and all, it was me and him, always.
I recall his Love more than I recall him, weirdly. He is so gone, has been so gone since he took his last breath. It was as if he and I had never been a we together. The mind fuck began at that moment.
I try to remember him as a man, as the man who was with me in our Love story, but it seems so distant. And that, too, is a mind fuck.
Did we even ever exist as a man and a woman together?
The mind fuck waits patiently for me, at the corners of my mind. Remember the agony of those last 3 weeks, it bids me. Remember that you can barely remember who you were together. Remember that there is only pain if you give energy to any of that.
No.
I may not remember much of us, in my mind. But my heart remembers being loved well and truly and passionately. It wasn’t a figment of my imagination, though his continued absence tries to tell me otherwise.
There was a man named Chuck, many years ago, and a woman named Alison, who fell in love and beat the odds against them. They were real people…there are pictures to prove it. And oh, how they loved each other and danced through time and kissed and held hands and were strong together and oh, how cherished and nurtured that woman felt.
Love did live for those 24 years, no matter what tricks my mind attempts to play.
Love lived.
It lives still, in a very unsatisfying way, because he isn’t here, but in a manifestly huge way, because he isn’t here.
Love fucking lives.
