death

"I'll die before you," she said repeatedly.    "I want to die before you."

And I would glare and retreat to the lonely inner cages where I have lived most of my life. 

Not that she was morbid or obsessed with dying.   It started when her mother died when she was in her mid-60s and she came to be diagnosed as a diabetic.   Not a Type 2 adult-onset diabetic, but what is now starting to be called Type One and a Half, a diabetic whose cells quit producing insulin and whose remaining cells are insulin resistant.    Not a type treatable by weight loss.

"Bad genes," she said.  A conclusion that is echoed by her brothers and sisters who see doom approaching.

"Your mother will outlive me," she said accusingly, as my mother crept toward the century mark and I was caretaker of my mother and not of my wife.

My father died at 72.   However his sister died recently at 102, I only found out this spring.   My mother's grandmother died the year I was born at 99.  I never told my wife that.   Mostly because there was so much else to talk about.

Even before all this I was worried.     There is a hypothesis around that mammalian species are pre-programmed to live a set number of heartbeats.   Shrews and tiny rodnts that have a jitterbug heartbeat life extremely short active lives.   Longer lived mammals like elephants and humans have a slow heart beat.   Dr. Kenneth Cooper who named and started aerobic exercise talked about how aerobic exercise while it increased pulse rate during exercise reduced it overall, thus "saving" heartbeats and adding, he implied, to our lifespan.  A "fixed-heartbeat" theory which may or may not have somehting in it.

In the early hours of morning I would feel my wife's pulse;  the beats would be motoring along at near 85 beats per minute.   My own pulse rate would drop in the wee hours to the 60s and recently to the low 50s.   I told myself none of that meant anything.  

Blood tests done two months before my wife's passing showed her chlesterol to be under 300 and triglycerides to be over 150, which was actually an improvement over what the numbers had been years ago.     But those numbers were twice mine.

Had I plied my wife with Vitamin D and baby aspirin and forced her to test her blood sugar, she would still be here, for a while.   95% sure. 

And now my wife's prophecies and genetics proved right and I am alone.   I am alone in my head;  her presence that I carried with me however far apart we were physically is gone.  I am a ghostly being floating through life, motivation and joy gone. 

As I stare down a bleak corridor of possible decades barring accident or cancer I think "What a curse!"   Not that it is more than I deserve, in some Twilight Zone moral play where the wicked and neglectful are punished.