the world is round - Life

Losing the Battle

2008-08-28T09:10:00Z

I’ve spent many nights sitting around in sorrow and self-pity wondering why my wife was taken from me by Lupus. She was 27 years old. She had a husband that would have made the sun kiss the moon just to see a smile on her face. She had so very much more love to give and life to live. Why was it her time? I think I’m starting to realize why.

Before she started suffering from some of the more severe things Lupus can cause in the early months of 2002 she was a vibrant 21 year old mother and wife. Nothing ever slowed her down or made her tired. She was always able to keep going no matter what. She was driven to be the best mother she could be and fought with everything she had to be a great wife too.

The first few months of 2002 brought a radical change we didn’t understand. Suddenly she wasn’t able to grasp a door-knob with enough strength to twist it. She had trouble standing or sitting, lying down was only slightly more comfortable. Walking was a chore – it was pure agony. She went from being totally capable of caring for our just over one year old son to being utterly petrified by the thought of not being able to get up and run to his side or worse yet, being able to overcome the pain of making it to his crib only to not have the strength to pick him up and comfort whatever caused his cries for help.

We went to her family doctor early in August of that year to find out what was wrong. On my birthday we got the call saying it was more than severe rheumatoid arthritis but was actually Lupus. Later that month she saw a specialist who said it wasn’t just Lupus, it was the worst case of Lupus he had ever seen or was even aware of. We researched Lupus over the next month and discovered rather quickly that while many people live long and reasonably healthy lives with Lupus someone with a case as severe as hers was likely terminal. Our two year marriage and five year relationship by that point suddenly had an expiration date.

Over the next six years I had almost as many occasions to be told by doctors that she wasn’t going to make it home. I never believed them. I knew she would fight and never give up. She survived the birth of our second son in 2003 despite being told that she would probably die giving birth or that her immune system would go into overdrive after the baby was born and kill her shortly thereafter. She survived being diagnosed with a complication from Lupus that made her heart beat with the same pace as an Olympic marathon runner in the middle of running a marathon – constantly.

This year, 2008, brought with it a different tone to her illness. It went from something that was just there and we knew it was there to being front-line and in our faces. Every day seemed to be filled with a new complication and her illness seemed to accelerate. Sometime in early April she had a severe stroke that left her mentally a shadow of her former self. She was still coherent but had a hard time remembering things as simple as what year it was or what her birthday was; for a short period of time she even forgot we were married.

By May when I got the call from her doctor that said her liver enzymes were elevated I didn’t need anyone to tell me she wasn’t going to come home from the hospital this time … I knew she wasn’t.

Finish It

2008-08-24T08:14:00Z

Tonight I watched a movie that wasn’t about anything remotely close to what I thought it was about…

When the previews came out for the movie my wife and I agreed that we wanted to go see this movie because it looked like an interesting romance story and we loved going to those together. Time passed and the movie came out in the theaters. That same time passed and my wife got very ill. We never made it to that movie while it was in the theaters. My wife did get a little better though. More time passed and the movie came out on DVD. And that same time passed again and my wife got much worse. We never got to rent that movie and watch it together. My wife never got better either.

I find it strangely prophetic that “The Fountain”, while not necessarily written as one, is, to this particular widower, a story about a fellow widower’s journey as he grieves over the passing of his wife and that a repeating message, “Finish It!”, is the exact thing I need to figure out how to do. I have to figure out how to finish my journey. But to finish my journey – I must first find it’s beginning.

I believe I’ve already found the very beginning of my journey. Unfortunately I believe I’ve also made a mistake in that beginning as well. I’ve attempted the impossible, failed, and I’ve hurt someone that didn’t deserve it in the process. I hope this person can find it in them to understand that I made a mistake and for that I am deeply sorry. I hope they can understand that I wish them only happiness. I hope they can understand that I’m just starting my journey and that our paths will cross again if they are meant to.

Living On

2008-08-19T22:21:00Z

I’ve spent the last few months trying to figure out the answer to the question: “How do I move on?” A friend recently pointed out that it’s not “moving on” but rather “living on” that I have to figure out how to do.

I’m still trying to figure out what the difference between those are but I think that’s part of what it takes to come back from losing a spouse. For me, part of living on is finding myself again – I let myself disappear into my marriage and my relationship with my wife. I know that it’s in my personality to put myself last and I imagine that is a large part of why I let myself be defined by my marriage and by her. Now I’ve got to learn how to put myself back into my own list of priorities. I have to figure out who I am all over again.

It occurred to me over the past several days that I really don’t know myself as well as I think I do. Even three months after her passing I still define myself by her. I realized that I still do a lot of the things we would do together, at least those I can do alone anyway. I wonder who I really am and what it is I really want and need because I just don’t know any more. Some of this realization comes from reading the various writings of Abel Keogh and seeing a few of the patterns and red flags he talks about in myself.

I’ve made a decision, the reason I’m writing this post, to pursue my definition for a while. I’m going to take some time to understand why I am were I am at the moment and exactly what it is that makes me who I am. I also plan to read Room for Two in hopes that it will help me find those things in myself that I have to specifically define and maybe get someone else’s view on what it means to live on. I don’t know how long this will take but I hope for the sake of certain people it doesn’t take very long at all.

Life Changing

2007-09-27T08:45:00Z

I got a call from my mother late last night, it’s 3:15am CDT after all, saying that a friend of the family had been killed in a motor-cycle accident. I barely knew person but it will still become an event that changed my life. This event has made me decide to move ahead with a few ideas I’ve had lying around for a really long time.

A few years ago, when I had my first blog up, I posted this (with a few spelling corrections):

I think the status says it best, right now this project is really nothing more than some serious thought. However, my plan for CrossesByTheRoad.org is to create a community site where everyone is welcome to contribute a story. The stories are the important part of the site… The stories, or testimonies, are about those individuals/families who died in an automobile related accident.

It dawned on me one day, as I passed a road-side memorial consisting of nothing more than a cross with a name on it and a bouquet of flowers beside it, that the only people who know anything about that memorial are those who are/were directly affected by the accident that prompted its placement. This inspired me to find out if anyone else had setup such a site, and thus far, I have been unable to locate one. Upon realizing such, I decided that I would try and create just that, a site dedicated to road-side memorials.

If you have any ideas for this project, or even a testimony you would like to see posted on it, please contact me.

Now’s the time to make that happen…