I’ve had a post, or series of posts up on social media for a few weeks now. I think I need to post this here, for ME on my website. I need to own this and keep it.
My wife of 30 years passed away in July. There’s no easy way to put that. She is gone.
Social media held a lot of messages and updates and information about arrangements and things like that. I think this post needs to give a little more, or rather a different view of things if not necessarily more.
My wife had health related struggles for many years. I’d posted about it and even published a piece about taking care of your own health during that time. She’d had more than a dozen hospital stays over the course of the past 20 years. Her first open heart surgery was back in the early 2000s when my daughter was just over a year old. Things always seemed to bounce back. We were always lucky I guess. We knew… but we didn’t know. The chance of everything going wrong was always there, it just never managed to actually happen.
Intellectually we were prepared. Physically and emotionally we struggled and muddled along. About 3 years ago Beck had her first major stroke. It took her a few days to come back around and start the recovery process. She did recover, mostly. She was never quite the same in a lot of ways. How we acted, the things we did and places we went changed and morphed over time.
On July 26th Beck started showing signs of having another stroke. I kept asking her what she was feeling and telling her she was worrying me. She couldn’t get up and walk without help, she started to lose the function of her hands. I asked her again what she felt was happening. The ambulance arrived, off we went to the hospital again. Somehow this felt different. There were other, small factors that were adding in here. They rushed her into surgery that Saturday night trying to relieve the pressure in her head. Nothing worked.
Three agonizing days with no real responses or movement or anything. A massive hemorrhagic stroke. We made the choice to go forward with her wishes of organ donation. It took until July 29th for her to be all the way gone.
Her last coherent words were, “I love you”.
I have cried more in the last month than I have in the last 20 years combined. Sitting here and typing things just doesn’t seem to cover it. I am wreckage. Almost a month along and I am only mostly functional. I’m planning to try to put more things here – but it will take time.