November 20 for me is one of those sad anniveraries that every widowed person is compelled to remember. It was on this date two years ago that my beloved Linda was hospitalized with severe pneumonia and hypoxia which accelerated a latent, terminal brain disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. When she returned from the hospital on November 23 and stepped into our kitchen, she asked, “Is this where we've always lived?” That was the beginning of a frightening journey for both of us.
December 23 was Linda's last day in our home before she went to McLaren Northern Michigan Hospital. She didn't say much in those last moments at home, and that made every word indelible. “I wish things were like they were,” she said in an almost childlike lament. Oh how I wanted to make her life happy again! How those words pierced my heart! All I could say—why do I always have to say something? – was, “I wish we were 50 again.” I still didn't know, or wouldn't accept, that her disease was incurable. But she knew.
The next thing she said, touched me deeply. She hugged me and said, “Thank you for taking care of me.” Though I didn't realize it at the time, that was the beginning of her goodbyes. Her final goodbyes came in the hospital when she looked up at me and said with great effort: “I-love-you.” And later, when she could no longer formulate coherent sentences, she reached up with her right hand, the only one that functioned, and placed it tenderly on my cheek. No words could say what that gesture said!
So November 20 marks the beginning of the end of the life and love I knew. Things will never be “the way they were.”
