Three years

Linda Hughes (January 2nd, 1944 - April 17th, 2012. (Photo by BobbaLew.)

Today, Friday April 17th, 2015, is three years since my wife died.
April 17th, 2012 was a Tuesday. I can’t remember exact details, but we had taken my wife to hospice perhaps Friday the 13th, or the following weekend.
I didn’t think it would be our last ride together. She seemed okay, although weak enough to need a wheelchair.
I should have known better. No one escapes hospice alive.
We tried everything. But her cancer kept winning. It kept coming back.
We ran out of options, and I think my wife was tired.
Her legs were starting to swell again. Not bad yet, but earlier the swelling had hospitalized her.
Only the super-deadly chemo stopped that, and we couldn’t use it any more. It can cause heart-damage.
We tried in-home hospice, but it became messy. Medications were forgotten.
So a social-worker arranged hospice about 20-25 miles from our home.
My wife’s mother, 96 at that time, flew up from Florida with my wife’s brother, 70.
They went to the hospice to see her.
My wife’s mother went ballistic. The hospice was a “dump” (it wasn’t); how could I have arranged such a thing?
As if I had any input on where the social-worker put us.
Her mother refused to leave; stayed with her the whole night. Slept in a chair.
I thought I might hafta go down there and do a Mexican Standoff, but my wife’s brother convinced her to leave. They had to fly back to Florida the next day.
I went down Tuesday afternoon with our dog, hoping the dog would perk her up.
She was asleep, so they said, barely breathing.
She didn’t look normal. They had her dressed in a frilly sleeping-gown.
They said she’d wake up, but she never did.
I put the dog back in the car, and returned to wait.
Finally I had to leave. “I got a dog in the car,” I said.
I walked out sniveling. “So long,” I said.
That night about 9 p.m. the hospice called to tell me she had died — trouble breathing.
Apparently they also called her brother and mother at Orlando Airport. Then her mother called me, crying, to say she was sorry my wife had died.
It was as if no longer was I a scumbag. We made 44+ years despite noisy predictions we wouldn’t. All-of-a-sudden it was no longer “look what the cat dragged in.”
I guess I’m no longer distraught, but I still miss my wife.
She was the best friend I ever had, and after my childhood I sure needed one.

A wreck! (Photo by Carol Button.)

I look at a picture of myself taken at my niece’s daughter’s high-school graduation-party and I look awful. That was back then, two months after my wife’s death.
I’ve done a grief-share, a bereavement-group, counseling, I take an anti-depressant, I work out at the YMCA, plus countless meetings and appointments to supposedly distract from missing my wife.
Plus as a railfan quite often I’ve been to Altoona, PA to chase trains — a pleasant pursuit, but after it’s back to reality.
I guess I’ve moved on, but I wonder how I’d be if she returned; that is, not such a challenge. My tortured childhood haunts me, particularly how I was reduced in self-worth.
My wife was propping me up, and I relied on it. I now have to generate my own self-worth.
I also am a stroke-survivor, and let my wife cover for me. So now I hafta do all the things she did for me, especially phonecalls.
So far, so good. But I miss my wife.
I went out to close the gates the other night.
There, off to the side, were the daffodils she planted.


A trigger. (Photo by BobbaLew.)

• “Carol Button” is my sister-in-law that lives here in Rochester (NY). She is my wife’s brother’s first wife, and grandmother of my niece’s daughter.
• I had a stroke October 26, 1993, from which I pretty much recovered.