Your Dying Spouse 118 - The Limits of Love {FMF}

Time for Five Minute Friday, the weekly keyword-inspired timed writing challenge hosted by the inimitable Kate Motaung.

This week's word is LIMIT. (And Kate gave me the word ahead of time, so that I had some hope of writing something...she's wonderful.)

So...let's go.

This is all very hard to write.

When you're dying, you learn a lot of interesting things. Kind of like Schooldays in Hell, really.

One of those is that love has limits. It has to have limits.

My world is winding down, and I'm concerned largely with blood and bone...how much blood am I losing, and how on earth am I going to be able to accomplish something meaningful today?

Will it be a day where all I can do is watch a DVD and have a cigar, and wait for my rationed morphine to kick in?

I almost died last night; I felt the shadow of the wings of the angel of death, and I could not breathe. Sylvia did canine CPR, jumping on my chest and barking into my face.

I think she broke one of my ribs, but who cares? Really.

Barbara didn't know; she needs a full nights' sleep to do her job, so I sleep on an ottoman in the kennel. Barb has her own room. Since I tend to wake up screaming from pain, some nights, this probably really saves her nerves (but what, I wonder, do the dogs think?).

And she should not have to notice these things, because her life will go on. She needs to look forward to what her life can still be. She's got a great job; it deserves her best. And she has many years ahead of her.

She can't, and should not pare her outlook down to a grim finality.

For her, American Idol is important. It should be; the songs move her, and they speak to her heart.

To me they're noise, manufactured emotion. With very few exceptions, they have nothing to do with me, no reference points that fit my life. I've lost that meaning, and see things through a lens that only allows the highest contrasts.

Life.

And death.

But I'm wrong. My outlook is flawed.

It's me that's leaving. And to impose upon my wife the viewpoint that's been through a refiners' fire of pain is unfair.

The plain fact is that at some point, the caregiving spouse has to begin a process of dissociation...to survive.

I don't want Barbara to be broken by my death, and sure as hell don't want this process to linger. I want her to have a normal life,after I'm dead, to find a guy she can hike with, and who'll be able to stand with her in church and sing, someone who can laugh and linger over coffee and who doesn't see every calendar as marking an inexorable slide.

I don't want her life to become a memorial to mine.

You can't live in someone else's Gethsemane. You can pray with them (and not fall asleep). You can stand at the foot of the Cross. You can anoint the body with oil...but you can't walk the Green Mile.

And the caregiver has to step away from Love, or be pulled beneath the waves as the ship goes down.

And I think that is enough. I'm in too much pain to write more.

If you can, please do leave a comment. I am trying to answer all, and I am failing, but please know this - I read and treasure each one.

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