Your Dying Spouse 505 - Respecting Grief {FMF}

Another horribly painful night...my screams woke Barb, as they did every night this week...and today happens to be our sixteenth anniversary. (And that was last week's Five Minute Friday prompt.)

Anniversaries...a time to look back.

And in a season of terminal cancer, a time to grieve what's been lost.

Our relationship, and marriage, will never be what it was. There's no shared adventure, no shared fun. What we share is pain, and the need to stabilize me...and walk the dogs who've become terrified at what's happening.

There were so many plans, place to go, things to do. Even small things, like an occasional dinner at Outback or Olive Garden.

But those are impossible now. Driving, for any distance, puts me into intolerable pain, and that's not the right way to drink a toast to love.

So, yes, grief. For hat might have been, for what's never going to be.

Except...I don't.

To me, what's happening is just 'one of those things'.

Shit happens, bring a shovel.

I really don't look back, and I don't look further forward than the next ten minutes or so. I've become ZenMan, living entirely in the present.

And that is so unfair to Barbara.

My world is proscribed; pancreatic cancer will kill me, eventually. I can fight for a long time, but the outcome isn't really in doubt. My life has an endpoint, and it's definite.

Not so, for my wife. She will live for decades yet (I hope!); my living in the now would be an unimaginable luxury for her, because she has to fit her life into a paradigm that includes past and future.

She's carrying the baggage, and I am forcing her to do so.

I'm not the only one hurting.

And I have to set her grief above my momentary calm.

For no particular reason, here's music from The Grass Roots, with Temptation Eyes.

Please pardon my slow response to comments. I do my best, and your comments are really precious to me. Barb is answering many of them now. I'm running on fumes, if you don't mind a macho metaphor.

I'm grateful for the energy to have written this. I'm so glad Barbara's stepped in for many of my posts. I'm really not doing well at all.

Thanks to Carol Ashby, Blessed Are The Pure Of Heart is back on Kindle, and will be available in paperback soon.

Friends are everything. I couldn't have done it.

Marley, the canine waif from Afghanistan, whom WE helped save, has a Facebook page! Please drop by to see how happy he is today.

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.

Below are my recent releases on Kindle -please excuse their presence in the body of the blog. I haven't the energy to get them up as 'buttons' in the sidebar. You can click on the covers to go to the Amazon links.