Dark Valley Hard Path

I always wanted my man to die first. Yes, awful but… hear me.

I knew if i died he would be devastated and I thought i was stronger to handle this ripping apart better. Also decades ago, i kinda thought i could be the merry widow but as time went on and we grew closer and older i knew i would be left adrift too.

By then though i had lost my mother and father, so i felt confident that i could survive this loss too.

Now i don’t know. A friend told me the second year is worse. I can’t really compare the scale but i gotta say this is bad.

I think some of it is a kind of delayed ptsd or whatever — images keep flashing into my mind of when he was paranoid and held me scared “how many of my children did you eat?”

And then the joy the love – even in the depths of dementia when we were truly souls meeting beyond the screens we usually put up to secure our inner being.

Right now, I think he was right when, years after he went into long term care, he announced with rare lucidity, “I’ve been thinking, and i think we should die together.”

But i try to forget when we first got a semi gentle diagnosis and he was skipping across the lawn afterwards, and said, “What is wrong with you? all the joy has gone out of you.”