Time travel

On Friday, the four month mark passed. I didn’t think time would move so quickly on this side. I think I also thought that things wouldn’t change, people wouldn’t move on, I wouldn’t shift things around in the house, I would stay on my side of the bed, and I would continue not to let the dog onto it, per Paul’s (and presumably Karl’s) rule.

Last week I stopped by the chemo suite at Tacoma General. I had been meaning to do this for months, but as I suggest above, that time flew. I should have expected the flood of emotions when I crossed the threshold into the too-familiar Milgard wing but it had been a few days since I had cried, so maybe I thought I was in the clear. I got to see and hug some of my favorites, and learned that one had moved to the Gig Harbor location, and that they all still think about Paul. They were so good to us during his treatment, and these nurses spend so much time with their patients – it breaks their hearts to lose them too.

Yesterday I was cleaning my email inbox, something that has to be done in small doses or it would take all week, and I came across an email that briefly debilitated me. It was a response to a note I had sent to my boss and manager in July describing how I thought the next month was going to go, and how it impacted my leave of absence. Reading this immediately placed me back in that moment, when we had just come back from a trip to New York, including vacation on Fire Island, but Paul was feeling worse and worse. His guts were literally starting to escape from an opening in his belly, he could barely eat, and he was rapidly losing weight. I was between “normal” life and the end of it. Still, I didn’t appreciate that that day would be the last one that Paul and I would share a bed. That we would soon be making decisions that could dictate how much longer he would live, in terms of weeks and days. That the time we had talked about often over the previous three years was actually here now. Reading this email didn’t make me want to relive that sadness, but it made me wistful for the time when I still had a Paul to care for.

I have had friends comment that certain blog posts make it sound like I’m not doing well, and I want to address that. I don’t write these things to alarm anyone or to signal that I am feeling what I write, on the whole. In fact, at the time that I write a post, I am probably in a pretty good mood. I do think about these things, and often, but my primary state of mind is pretty normal. Filled with all the mundane concerns about taking care of myself and my pets, plus fun projects and workouts and spending time with friends and planning the future. It just helps me to write these things because a lot of you don’t know. And I’m afraid one day I will forget. And I actually think it’s pretty interesting to observe it and put it down in writing. Think of it as the text version of a curated Instagram page – I am not dumping the emotions I feel right now, but telling a story.