Your Dying Spouse 49 - Alone In The Fight {FMF}

We're here for Five Minute Friday, hosted by the gracious Kate Motaung; it's a five-minute timed writing challenge based on a keyword, which this week is...alone

We're also with Weekend Whispers, and Inspire Me Monday.

Execute.

Dying can be a pretty lonely business.

It prys you away from the life that rushes past you, and throws you into a gyre in which everything is redolent of raw meat and steel and gunpowder.

Every day is literally life and death.

You don't get to escape; there are no days off. There's no respite time.

The enemy isn't at the gates; he's in your living room, and you're fighting hand-to-hand while your family's watching TV.

Alone.

And that's as it should be.

I don't want my wife to experience the change in worldview I have gone through; she has had her own changes, inevitably, but to her there's still something to be gained from cheering on her favourite on America's Got Talent.

She can still experience the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat as it applies to sports; it can still matter to her, because she can step back. I want her to have that respite.

I can't. My life's narrowed down to a single point; get through the next minute, and keep writing, keep trying to make this all mean something.

That's life and death for me.

I don't want her to be in this sometimes humourless and always ruthless vale of wrath.

I want her to have the sunlight.

Endex.

As an extra note, the support she has given me, and that of my online family, has been something I could not do without; 'alone' in this context doesn't discount those. It merely means that I have to refrain from making my situation the most important thing that's happening in my wife's life (it is, but I don't need to emphasize it), and refrain from making it all revolve around me.

Life goes on; it should, and I want it to.

The last few days have been among the worst I have faced; I am glad to still be living. Being afraid to sleep, in case you don't wake up...saying to your wife, "Well, just in case...if this is it, it's been fun, and I'd do it again" followed by a fist-bump...all that's kind of a bummer.

And this post was terribly hard to write. I don't want to face these things; I don't want to have to do this analysis, this dissection of a fell process.

But it's my job.

We're linked with the Wedded Wednesday,