True Love, No Matter What.

We are now getting down to the last four days of my husband's life.  I can tell you that by the time we reached those last days I was sure that I knew what it must be like to be in hell.  It was pure agony going to that hospital and sitting there with him listening to him as he gasped for breath and caughed like crazy when he wasn't trying to get his breath.  He couldn't talk much and I'm not sure that he even wanted to.  It was also during those last days that I realized just how much I loved him and I wanted to tell him more than anything what all of the years that we had spent together meant to me and how he was the only man that I had ever loved or would ever love.  I wanted to tell him a million things about how much our lives together meant to me.  Most of all I wanted to tell him just how sorry I was for the way I had behaved over the last months and ask for his forgiveness.  Instead I left him that day without saying any of those things.  As I drove home I felt such deep regret and remorse not only for the weeks and months before but for the short amount of time that I knew we had left.  I fought hard to hold back the tears but the tears won out.  It happened that

Hello Everyone,

Today is Valentine's Day and I am missing my husband a great deal.  Valentine's Day was always a special day for me because my husband would always buy me a dozen roses.  Each one was a different color.  My favorites were the peach and the lavender.  I just loved those roses and the card he always bought for me.  My nickname for him was "Chicken Legs" so he always sighned the card "Your Chicken Legs".  He would also take me out to dinner at a resturant that had a fireplace with the fire going in it.  Life was so different then.  We thought only of each other and talked about the coming years and all the good things that we wanted out of life and how much we were looking forward to going to the beach in the summer time.  How I miss his witt, humor and tenderness when we went out together.  He always made it a point to ask the waitress her name and remembered to call her by name whenever she waited on us. The heartbreaking part is that last year on this holiday we stayed home and did nothing and the silence was almost unbearable between us.  Little did we know that our time together was coming to an end and there would be not more beautiful roses or romantic dinners together.  I remember thinking just before he passed away, "How did we ever come to this  point"?  We may as well have been a million miles away from each other and we acted as total strangers. What little reaction there was between us had now boiled down to a lot of differences of oppinion  and scornful looks toward me on his behalf. 

 Recapping what I wrote last night. First there was the devastating news from the doctors that my husband had lung cancer. Then came the operation to remove his right lung where the cancer was only to be told by his surgeon that the cancer had already spread into the lympth nodes and there was nothing that could be done. As I said, even then it did not fully register with me that my husband was going to die one day soon. What did register fully took some time on my part and I am sure on his part too.  We both thought that together we could beat this horrible thing that was happening even after the operation.  There were days when my husband felt great and went out to help the neighbors with their yards and anything else he could do for them. We went on as if there really wasn't anything to worry about after all.  Joel (my husband) began his sessions for radiation and for chemotherapy not long after he got out of the hospital.  I would normally go with him and just sit by his side and talk to him as the nurses injected him with needles and hooked him up to a tube running in his arm containing the chemo.  It always took at least an hour or two from beginning to end of each session depending on who was ahead of him and how many.  Like anything else even cancer makes you wait your turn.  The nurses were wonderful to both of us.  They usually fixed us a lunch that we could have together and we enjoyed being around them.  After awhile the radiation part of it stopped but the chemotherapy continued up until about five weeks before my husband passed away.  I would be lying to you and to myself if I told you that I wanted to go with him every

It has been almost nine months since my partner in life, my husband, my sole mate passed away from lung cancer.  There have been many days when I have re-lived that last year wondering over and over if I could have done anything different. Could I have been a better wife and friend? As time goes by I become more and more unsure.  For the first time since his death I am facing a lot of truths about myself and my reactions toward him and the cancer. 

When we first got the news about his cancer I was absolutely stuned and devastated.  All that I could think at that point in time was that he was going to die. I selfishly thought "what am I going to do without him"?  "How am I going to survive"?  It was all about "me" and how I was going to be inconvenienced because he was going to be leaving me forever.  Not just a day, not just a month, but for the rest of my life. You may wonder "what was she thinking" and I will