5 weeks - Regret

I read your autopsy report today and wailed. I thought of your shoulder injury and could picture the thin line running vertically when they described it. I could see your healed midsection scar from a childhood appendectomy like me. I was at peace to know there was so much cancer everywhere. I felt less regret for saying yes to stop the care aimed at curing you. Still, I wonder if we stopped chemo too soon. Was there any hope? Could we have at least gotten you to the ocean? I think now how you kept asking me to go to the water - the ocean, a pool, a hydrotherapy bath. How I could not help you. How I kept promising you ‘maybe tomorrow’. You were unable to speak. You had not spoken in maybe a week. When your family asked me how long it had been since you could talk I could not answer them. I did not notice that much because we could still talk without words. I know you. You know me. I know your looks and what they mean. Plus you had incorporated basic sign language symbols we had learned from our one-year-old nephew visiting you. We also used scuba diving signals. The sign to surface became the sign to raise the bed. To dive together side-by-side meant for me to come closer to the bed. Sign language for milk was a request for Ensure. The sign for rain meant to pour ice water on your head. I knew you wanted to get in the water when you made the sign language for fish on your last day. When I said maybe tomorrow, you said ‘oh well’. As if you knew there were no more tomorrows. Did you say this with your eyes, a shrug, a tilt of the head? I don’t recall because to me it was the same as if you spoke the words. I think of holding your head to my chest as you left, of telling you I would look after your girls, and I loved you. I said ‘I love you’ with such deep sadness as your heart rate continued to drop and you stopped breathing. I felt you go. When I looked a the heart monitor the flat line was eating the mountains like a Pac Man. I am lonely. Yet, not as lonely as before I met you. I am more at peace now. Now, that someone has loved me unconditionally, without fear, without jealousy, without their selves first. You loved me first and then your self and I am at peace. I am sure my loneliness will grow without you ever coming back home. I will be so lonely to go places without you especially the places we already had tickets for, the places we had planned, that we had scheduled to take off work, all the places we had on our list. How I miss you pumpkin. How I wish we had years and years. I fear I am sick too. I wonder what I will do. I am scared. How scared you must have been.