Worth Fighting For

Chapter 1 FAIRY TALE
The moment I reached for my notebook to start working on this book, I was flooded with an emotion that I’ve tried to keep at bay for some time now. It’s a wave of feeling composed of endless tears, reminding me that I haven’t remotely cried enough.
The emotion that washes over me brings the distant past to an instant present. And the details scream out in my mind and heart: every time I pushed down my feelings, every time I smiled when my world was tumbling down around me, and every time I heard a piece of bad news and reacted positively, laughing with mock bravery when I should have been dissolved in tears.
There is a high price to be paid for the privilege of caring for your loved one when he’s dying, but it’s one I wouldn’t have traded for anything. I always said that I’d have plenty of time to cry later. When Patrick first got his diagnosis it looked like he might have only weeks to live. Then it was months. And then, luckily, we passed a year. And we kept going. . . . Twenty-one months is a long time to battle for your loved one against a foe like cancer. It’s a long time to “hold up.” And now, I’ve been spit out on the other side of the fight, alone, trying to figure out how I’m going to go on with my life.
Hot and cold.
Right now I’m running hot and cold.
As I write this in May of 2010, it’s been over six months since I lost Patrick, and right now, at this particular moment, I either despise the bad times he and I had together, or worship the good we had. No in-between.
So, at this particular moment, I worry how can I talk about us, him, in an objective way. One that gives an accurate, albeit can’t-help-but-be-emotional-here-and-there idea of what really happened, who he really was, who I have been, and who I am now. ’Cause I tell you, I am a different person now. One who has been thrown into the fire and forged. One who got stripped of all the nice things that sheltered me from the world, and from myself.
It’s been hard living out here in the cold. I look for a life raft anywhere, and there’s none to be found. No usual anchors to ground me. No more comfortable illusions. But this person I am is real, painful in its growing spurt, the growing spurt that’s happened without my husband . . . but real. And because I am real there are possibilities.
Now, this isn’t the way to start a book, but . . . I guess I’m having an angry day, one of those days that happens sometimes since the loss of my Buddy (“Buddy” was his lifelong nickname). And, yes . . . I guess I am sad.
I think I was hoping to wrap my experience with him up with a nice little bow. And remember it that way. At arm’s length. So, if I seem a little caustic right now, it’s just my attempt to have an arm’s-length view of the story I’m telling. And unfortunately, I know that my being snarky is an attempt to not feel the loss. Because . . . when I talk about him (as I’m doing here) . . . I miss him so much.
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