Bob died.
We were so positive. We had such a good attitude. We knew he could beat this thing. He had sailed through the conditioning chemo. His blood counts were good. There was no cancer in his blood (or a biopsy showed, in his bone marrow). But MDS is a "sticky" cancer. It can lurk inside the bones. We were told that the drugs could hold it back, but not indefinitely.
We knew this. Our friend Anna had responded so well to the drugs to treat her cancer. Big tumors got smaller; smaller ones went away. That worked for about a year; then suddenly they stopped working and we attended her funeral 6 weeks later. This underscored that we really did have to take the next step, the one that would give his life back: the bone marrow transplant. It was underscored again when we checked into the hospital at Shands and I spoke with another caregiver. Her husband had been "cured" by drug therapy two years previously. Then it roared back and he was in for his transplant.
We had to do this. We hadn't had enough time together.
I don't know how much I'm going to write of our time in Gainesville. Simply put, it didn't work. He had the bone marrow transplant. It took about a week longer than expected to graft. And then it failed. And he went through that brutality a second time, and it didn't graft in time.
I have a lot to deal with, and to work out. I just want to put it in a box in the back of my mind, labelled "do not open". But yesterday I broke down and lay down on the floor and screamed of loss and sorrow.
And I think I had to scream, for that poor woman who had to stay strong, who had to stand by him, to support him, to stay positive, for that three long months as she watched him die. It was so brutal, and I couldn't react to it.
I talked with Amanda last night. She said that when Bob was able to call her to say goodbye, that he had decided to end treatment and die on his own terms, she tried to stay strong and support him and tell him she loved him and to thank him for being in her life. And then, when she hung up, she collapsed and wept.
I helped him make that phone call. And the one to his sister. And I looked in his eyes and said "yes" when he asked me to let him go. But I couldn't collapse; I was still his strength.
But it is over, along with my life.
You see, when you live and love with someone, you merge. Everyday life, from what you eat for breakfast to major life changes, is done in the context that it will affect the other person. It's a dance, a ballet, often a compromise. We were BobandAnn (sung to the Beach Boys song--Bob Bob Bob, Bob Bob and Ann). Our little grandnephew Zeke use to call us both Uncle BobAnn until he was old enough to understand we were two separate people. We of course had our individual lives, but in that Venn diagram there was a big overlap that was BobAnn. Now it's just me--a lone circle with a big crescent bite taken out of it.
I look around at the house, the land, the cats, and realize they aren't "ours" anymore. They're mine.
And I have to figure out who I am now. As I told the motel clerk when I checked out, when he offered his sympathy "I have to go make a new life now. For his sake, I will try to make it a good one."
Two pictures, taken a few months before we met. The last time we were two separate people.
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