AKA "The Writing Woman"
Pain menu Which memory shall I select? What will bring on the tears? You at the end? Hooked to monitors, breathing by machine? You at the beginning? Our first date? Our first kiss? Or the many options from the 21 years in between? The memory selection is endless. The choices are triggered with little to…
You’re supposed to be in the next room. It’s Friday, work at home day. We’re supposed to chatter back and forth all day, you in your office across the hall, me in mine. But it’s silent. I can’t hear your big fingers clacking away at the keyboard – the fastest hunt and peck typing I’ve…
We did everything together. I sit here mourning your death, and I think, who would understand this pain? We did everything together. Since you retired in 2011, you’d drive me to work in the morning, pick me up and take me to lunch, then pick me up and take me home. On Fridays, I worked…
The world talks of the solar eclipse. The day you died, pain eclipsed my world.
Once you got the death sentence, you said there was nothing we could do about it. But you didn’t die that Christmas, and you didn’t die that spring. And we got Christmas with the family. And we got spring in Florida. And – in between hospital visits – we got summer at home. We got…
This is our house. You planted these ficas in the front yard. You built these wooden pillars to cover the old colonial ones. You carried this bench to the front porch – the one that we brought from our home in Maryland. You cut this grass. You put in the new front door, and put…
You thought you couldn’t live without your Aunt Pat You thought you couldn’t live without your mom You thought you couldn’t live without your dad And now Rick It gets harder and harder as people leave you. Your special support system. Those who loved you like no other person ever did. And I type this…
I never finished writing this journal entry, but it was interesting coming across it several months after Rick died. I didn’t have much time to write, but I’m glad I had this one short entry because it reminds me of how early on the reality of his impending death really started to sink in. January…