Well, this day has come. I spent it rather quietly. Mostly, I've been sorting that mountain of alpaca that I was given. It's a quiet and meditative task, a good thing to be doing.
I've found myself thinking of a woman who was on the Roads Scholar trip a few years ago. I thought of her as bird-like, petite and perky. When we were talking, I mentioned that Bob and I had been a bit scandalous because we moved in together a couple of weeks before we got married, which was still a shocking thing in the early 1970s. She got a mischievous look on her face and said she moved in with her husband on their first date. Her husband is still alive - in a care facility, because his Alzheimer's got bad enough that he was sometimes violent and she couldn't handle him anymore. So he's there, and doesn't know her, and she travels.
I can't imagine losing someone that way. But maybe I can, just a little. In previous years, I said this was the day that Bob and I said goodbye. That's the way I would have wanted it to be. I wish we would have looked each other deep in the eyes, said "I love you" and said goodbye. But it wasn't like that. I kept trying to get his attention, to get him to look at me, but he sort of brushed me aside and was focusing on the nurse, asking him to get on with it, get the morphine drip going, I know that he was afraid, and that he wanted to get it over with, and that the toxins in his system were messing up his mind - but I wish he had said goodbye.
Today is the day I lost him. Tomorrow he will stop breathing.
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