I'm Going Where There's No Depression

 Entry 1     8:56 a.m.

Early mornings are the hardest. I wake up without the routine, the ritual. She isn't beside me, just the empty space where the hospital bed sat. I can see her dying in it, her final gasps mechanical, nothing more. Eyes shut, chest heaving every minute or so. Breathing was so intermittent, I kept believing she had died. But when it happened for real, I knew. "She's dead," I said to Leiney and Jane. We had been there with her, talking amiably. 

The fish breathing, as it is called, started a day earlier. Her suffering, which had become such a part of her life, our lives, had entered the realm of the banal. Not for her, to be sure. She fought with every fiber in her being to stay alive. It only prolonged her suffering. I would rub her head and kiss her. I would whisper "its okay to let go. I love you." Her life already gone, her sentience a question mark, I just didn't want her to suffer anymore. I couldn't stand watching as the cancer relentlessly worked to cause every kind of pain and suffering anyone could imagine. I didn't leave her side. I cried silently. I sang to her. I held her hand. I ran my fingers over her brow, through her short gray hair. It had all been too real, but still, even we who knew the inevitable outcome, were twisted with fear, regret, and disbelief as Jenny, wracked with cancer, bleeding from her liver, as thin as a hunger striker, left us.  

Ivar's Salmon House
I wake to that image some mornings, a vignette in my head that just keeps playing. Life is a cascading series of disappointments, I know it is true. We move from one loss to another, with joy and suffering in between. Would that I had the power to make all of this go away, to take us back to the days of shadow puppets on the apartment wall, giggling uncontrollably at our silliness, I would wave that wand today. I would happily make all the same mistakes, and suffer all of the problems we had for those indelible moments of rapt ecstasy, the birth of our children, our wedding vows, our first Christmas together. All the king's horses.  .  .

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