For Pam: Death Not Wanted or Welcome

Pam . . . sometimes I take longer these days to make an entry in my blog and seeing your comment I wish I'd seen it earlier. Just read your Sept 22 comment and today's Sept 28. Hope you return and find this entry.


This time of year brings to mind the beginning of my husband and my final journey together. My recent return to the ranks of those between jobs (yes, I'm still working; must for both financial and personal survival) has added times of regression into feeling a little more "down" than usual these days. I know I can use the time positively and perhaps that's why I've been "given" another opportunity to regroup and rejuvenate. 


Ten months is so long and so short a time. And approaching the holidays and that first marker, one year, . . . I remember. Sometimes I just can't believe it'll soon be four years since my husband's passing. And, it's now been eight months since my Mom's passing. Days often blur as do nights.


Time moves forward taking us with it. I move forward realizing I have to provide and I must find ways; this continuing struggle has sometimes offset the loss. I know for myself I need to actively engage my mind and my spirit; it's what I've always done and must continue to do to be "me". For even as "us", he was still "him" and I was still "me" and as I move forward I'm grateful we walked the road of life in this way.


UTI's are horrid and so prevalent in hospitals, rehabs and Long Term Care facilities. Infectious diseases are rampant in many facilities and they're something given little attention or interest. I'll write another time about the challenges we went through with the dozens of infectious diseases we encountered with both my husband and my mother when hospitalization or care in a facility was necessary.


I see my stats rising but don't get many comments. I'd like more input, more conversation, more feedback but understand many who possibly read my writing are walking those most difficult roads and hopefully reading about my still continuing journey and all that went before helps them in some way.


You commented about the entry Three Times Three: Screams of Guilt Beginning to Subside and shared the loss of your beloved husband of 48 years. We walk together and many walk the same path, Pam, they're often invisible to us and sometimes they emerge when we least expect in a chance meeting, as happened to me as I wrote in that entry.


We're here; we see; we are the unseen and often the unheard as we take our own hands and wrap them around our backs to keep moving, pushing forward through those "gelatinous" times when we feel like we're floating in a time and place without any perceived up, down or sideways.


I'm walking ahead of you on the journey through life after losing those so close, so loved and so missed . . . and honestly, some days and even some minutes are better than others even after almost four years since my husband's passing.


It wasn't my husband who had the LBD. He contracted MRSA and so many horrible medical challenges from October 2009 until he passed in January 2011. WOW! That looks like such a long time when I write it that way. If you read it by the year dates, it appears longer but if you see the months and know the dates, you realize it was about 15 months. Such a short time as we measure time but measured in the pain and suffering, the confusion and lack of information, the constant level of emergency and never knowing from minute to minute what was going to happen next, it was an eternity for him and for us.


We pledged ourselves to one another through sickness and in health, to love and to cherish and then there was that statement we only saw as "someday" and "far into the future" -- til death do us part. Looking at our wedding pictures, remembering the ceremony, seeing the joy and happiness in our faces and the expectations of our future together --- so much of life ahead of us.....together.


Flash forward to today and through all the days we shared together. And, that's the reality -- shared together. Even when he travelled five days a week for work; when we had our differences; when we were upset about outside challenges that affected one or both of us; we were together.


Some would say to you and to me, well, you had that time together. How fortunate you were. So many years. And, hearing about the losses of children and spouses who pass when loved ones haven't had "that much" time together, I understand, but I'm still feeling my loss, my hopes and my dreams that are so changed and so different now without him.


As I write I hope to share the positives as well as the challenges and how this continuation of life is a part of life, unwelcome and unwanted as it is.