Regrets

Blessing for the Brokenhearted

There is no remedy for love but to love more.  --Henry David Thoreau

Let us agree

for now

that we will not say 

the breaking makes us stronger

or that it is better

to have this pain

than to have done

without this love.

Let us promise

we will not

tell ourselves

time will heal

the wound,

when every day

our waking 

opens it anew.

Perhaps for now 

it can be enough 

to simply marvel

at the mystery

of how a heart

so broken

can go on beating,

as if it were made

for precisely this--

as if it knows

the only cure for love

is more of it,

as if it sees

the heart's sole remedy

for breaking

is to love still,

as if it trusts

that its own

persistent pulse

is the rhythm

of a blessing

we cannot

begin to fathom

but will save us

nonetheless.

--Jan Richardson

Tomorrow (or today depending upon when I actually post this) will mark four years since Tom died.  The week leading up to this anniversary is generally more difficult than the actual day itself.  That day was the culmination of the anticipation of what I knew was coming, but did not know the exact day, time or experience.  And each day this week I have relived the circumstances.  Two days before a hospital bed was delivered to our home.  I asked Tom about it, and he really didn't want to, perhaps because what it meant to him.  I explained that our bedroom was our sacred space and I wanted to keep it that way, that I didn't want a lot of strangers traipsing through it.  He understood and reluctantly agreed.  So began our last two nights together, me sleeping next to him on the couch, him in a bed.  He was so weak and I woke up every 45 minutes to help him.  I was getting cranky from all of the awakenings and then I remembered something my friend, also a widow, told me about the time caring for her husband.  She wished she had stayed in the love.  That clicked into my brain and it changed how I approached the day, I wanted to stay in the love.  So on that Monday morning, the day before he died, I lovingly bathed him and shaved him (he was pretty scruffy) and changed his clothes.  Hospice came by in the afternoon to check on him and tweak his meds.  That evening our niece and nephew stopped by.  As we were getting ready to go to sleep, Tom looked at me and said "I think it is going to be tonight".  He never ever talked to me about dying.  I restrained myself from saying "Don't say that." and instead asked why he thought that to be the case.  He said he was so weak.  I reminded him that his brother was arriving the next day.  I so wanted him to hold on until his brother arrived.  I have only one regret about that night and it is I didn't further the conversation, that I didn't ask him if there was anything that he wanted to tell me.  And that I didn't get a chance to tell him how much he meant to me.  I lost that chance.  I was too busy doing to take care of him that I didn't allow the space for what was really important.  That is what I regret from 1,460 nights ago.  He knew how much I loved him, and I know how much he loved me.

A lot has happened in the last four years  It has been a brutal journey made more difficult with the onset of heart rhythm dysfunction which led to surgery which had a rare complication from which I am still trying to heal.  Tom's death figuratively and literally broke my heart.  I've been in the process of rebuilding my life, albeit more slowly because of recovering from my heart challenges.  I've reclaimed my home--paint and carpet and other changes to make it my home, not our home.  It has been two steps forwarded and one step back.

I find it astounding that my heart has kept on beating these past four years.  Even though it took a left at Albuquerque when it came to its rhythm, it has stayed solidly in rhythm for the last eight months, even with this complication.

When this man came into my life, it changed everything.

Tom

1952-2015

And when he died everything changed again.