legacy

Our step daughter-in-law put toether some marvelous pictures she had taken over a half-dozen years into a slideshow.   She asked me what was my wife's favorite song.  I choked out "All I need is the air that I breathe and to love you."  

A few minutes later she had blended the song and pictures into a symphony of emotion.   I could hardly watch. 

I wanted to share this with my wife, to dial her cell phone and hope she would answer.

I had the weird feeling that my wife had repeatedly told me this was a favorite song just so the song could be used in this way at her funeral.  It being settled between us (in my wife's mind at least) that I would survive her.  "I want to go before you,"  she told me many times.  

I am not a loveable or loving person.  Can never utter affectionate words without stilt or discomfort.   And my wife was a type A hard-worker who wore herself out far too quickly.   But as I experienced the slide show I was overcome with the legacy of love left us by my wife.   Even to me, who never wanted this terrible role of survivor. 

undone

Somebody said that what we regret most are not the things we did but those we didn't do.   I am full of regret there.

Trips never taken, trips never taken together because I thought I couldn't go, events unattended, movies unseen, books unread, words unsaid.

She asked me to teach her to play chess.   Once this year.   I didn't.

I learned to ride a bicycle because of her, actually.   She bought an old Schwinn Varsity at a police auction.  It sat there for several years and finally I got off with it and took it apart.  It was when she told me a son bought a bunch of bikes at an auction and they were all riding that I decided to learn.  So I learned.   And we rode together twice only.  I didn't encourage her because I worried about her getting hurt.  My bones don't break, my bruises don't hurt; hers did.

I wanted her to play golf, got her sets of clubs twice.  The first set diasppeared, borrowed by someone.  The second sits nearby.  Once we went out into the yard for 5 minutes to swing at whiffle balls.

She wanted a child, and undertook a costly and dangerous regimen of hormones.  I was often not there at the critical times.  We never had a child of our own. 

So often and so long I was not there.  I was not even half a husband.

She should have married someone rich but caring.  Instead she got me.  

The last time I saw her alive, at the airport leaving for vacation, they were late for the plane and fussing with baggage and children and I did not hug or kiss her.   I waived, when I thought she looked my way, but she didn't see.   I did not speak to her again.

Should

It should have been me.   I wish it were me.  I want to die.   I don't know how much longer I can stand this.  

hard

Its hard to lose your only lover, confident and friend, that you were married to for 26 years and knew for 27.  She told me I was her rock, her anchor, her best friend.   I was a poor one.  But she was my only anchor to reality.  

If

Had my wife been alive today, she would have jumped up and clapped her hands as the Supreme Court decision was announced.  She was unable to get coverage, being in a high risk group, and has she lived this would have enabled that.

I wish there were a way of turning the clock back just a few days.  She need not have died.  All this was preventable, by her and by me.  Not permanently preventable, but delayable.   I survive alone and I bear the burden alone.

Part is guilt, the fact of things unsaid and undone.  So many.   And in not preserving the life of my beloved, I failed her one more time.  All I had to do was insist she see a doctor about her heart.   That she take a glucose meter and use it.  I could have done this from afar.   Her phone is full of my unanswered calls and text messages. 

Everywhere in my life and my environment are her footsteps.  Places we were, places we walked, things we said.  There is no escaping them.   They are there but she is gone.  

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I'd hoped I'd not live to see this day.

I was told that chances were I would.  I didn't believe it and didn't want to think about it.

Death is just around the corner, for each of us. 

Now the better part of me is gone.  The light of my life is gone.   There is no hope and no future.