His arms

Today I watched a couple sitting across the room from me in the waiting room at the cancer institute. Like many who wait there, they looked tired, perhaps from a long day of tests and waiting for results. It was the woman who had cancer. You could see it in the wrinkles on her face and the weariness in her eyes. At first I thought that the man with her might be her son as he looked considerably younger than she. But all thoughts of that retreated when I saw the tenderness with which he held her. He had his arm draped again the back of the sofa, drawing her into his protective embrace. And she had a peaceful smile on her face as she closed her eyes and rested her head upon his shoulder. One that you might expect to see while relaxing on a sunny beach or when listening to moving music, but certain not in an oncologist's waiting room. I couldn't help but smile at them, thankful that the woman had at least those seeming moments of peace or those strong arms around her. But I also couldn't help feeling sad as I sat in the waiting room alone.

I was once a half of a couple like that. One part of a whole. I fit perfectly in the crook of his arm, even with my largeness compared to his sinewy frame. That crook was my safe place. A place that I could smile even while curled up next to him in a hospital bed. Our entwined fingers created a bond that held us together and would not be broken, except by the sneaky shadow of death. Together we were a force to be reckoned with, a firm foundation, with one of us being the stronger one when the other one needed to be vulnerable. We were a safe haven for each other, a home like no other, where love always won in the end. Well, until love was no longer enough to keep death from coming in, when all of the bargains and extensions had been traded in, when there was nothing left to hold but a lifeless hand that was no longer my husband.

Some nights when I can't sleep I imagine that he is there holding me. I recall the way that he liked to drape his right leg over my body and snuggle his head against my shoulder. I picture his hand cupping my cheek and his lips gently kissing away tears as they ran down my face. I try to replicate the way I held him in his hospital bed after I decided to take him off of life support. I close my eyes as tightly as I can abs try to strike a deal with God, with the Universe, with anyone that will listen. I'll do anything I plead, anything, to have him back. I tell myself that if I believe hard enough, that if I tell myself it will be so and believe it, I will wake up and find him there. But that doesn't happen. Maybe because it is simply impossible or maybe because I don't believe it enough. In the end it doesn't matter. He is gone, and at least for now, I'm still here. I admit it feels like a cruel joke sometimes--the love of my life is taken away and I am told that I must continue living and eventually move forward. Then only 5 months into the baby steps forward, I am diagnosed with cancer. At first it looked manageable--so I would just have to endure this with out him, but eventually I would move forward, have a new life, start over. Only to have that reality ripped out from under me with a stage IV diagnosis and decreasingly likelihood that my cancer is going to be receptive to anything we throw at it. So the story looks like it may end like this: girl loses love of her live, girl suffers through 2 years of cancer treatment without him. Then girl dies. Why couldn't someone have had mercy on me and just let me die with him so that I did not have to endure this suffering?

I don't know, so I do all that I know how to do (stolen from Sleepless in Seattle), get out of bed every morning [and] breath in and out all day...