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.