How do you say goodbye to the ones you love?
To know your life has a much shorter expiration date. They have, with lots of luck, decades yet to live?
You have moments of sharing everything..
You have moments of not being able to talk about it. As if doing so the truth of what you are facing won’t happen. You’ll somehow manage to freeze time, preserve the present.
Then you flip and realize how precious the good moments are. How fleeting.
You become spontaneous, and drastic. Grasping at things to do. Quick memories. Ticking boxes off a bucket list written haphazardly on a napkin. Laughing you could have made it as a note on a phone. Something about pen and paper feeling more real, something physical to hold onto.
How do you get the ones you love through the dark days. When the energy is fleeting. Or the really dark days when you wake in a zombie movie sized pool of blood, again.
Or the really, really bad days when you’re curled up in a fetal position, manage to get to the bathroom two hours after the sensation started, and notice in the mirror how blue you are.
Or worse sitting otherwise fine and feel that subtile lifting off. You panic and grab back on to what you never knew you were holding onto so easily your whole life. Feeling the seams stretch where soul meets body. Desperate for just another hour, day.. week with them. Not now. Not yet.
Then the thoughts come that you don’t share with them. How to prevent those you love more pain. Them seeing you when the long earned plateau ends and you really get ill. How do you avoid that suffering yourself?
The running thoughts of means to a quick end. Then flip again and think what you might waste if 24 hours of tomorrow are in fact good.
Game. A big chess game. With the greatest odds put out on the table through no thought or will of your or your loved ones own.
Do you play or make your own rules?
How do you let go when it’s not your choice?
How do you let go knowing they said they’ll never choose to be happy with anyone else. Knowing they’ve already threatened out of grief to follow close behind. Hoping they won’t.
Dying slowly is so much worse than not being able to say goodbye. It isn’t quick, empty, tidy. It’s monstrous.
How do you show gratitude for a lifetime of memories with someone you fit perfectly with. How do you slice apart and not end them too. A person you know so well you seemingly read each others minds. For children so great they are turning out even better than the two of you put together.
And how do you sum it up in just a handful of words.
That strong, emotionally and physically, tall, beautiful, inside and out, thoughtful, caring, protective, loving man.
A man who only just moments ago came down onto his knees before me in panic. With tears streaming down his face. Saying that he can’t do this. It isn’t fair. It shouldn’t be me. This shouldn’t happen to people like us.
To slow dance to our song as comfort for the countless time and wondering if it might be the last time. To be his strength for the first time in months, until he fell asleep in my arms for a change.
How do I sum this up.
For all of my best years I was blessed to have found, befriended, fell madly in love with (and boy have we loved) this wonderful man. And one day I’ll have to say…
He used to be mine.
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