Dec 6, 2010: I Was Supposed To Be the One to hold your hand when the time comes.....

I picked up my husband in the train station this evening.  Told him about the CT scan that showed things in the liver.  

I thought I processed the most raw emotions during the day.  I thought I would be more composed when I picked him up.  I was wrong.

I cried all the way home, and parked the car on the street for a while because I needed to compose myself in case Jon sees me in the family room when I enter through the garage.  I am keeping this quiet from the kids yet.  Daniel is coming home from college on Saturday, and we plan to have a nice dinner out and discuss this in the evening together as a family.

I don't know when was the last time I cried so hard.   It was not one of those dainty, romantic, and elegant sobs of a movie heroine.  It was a loud and painful cry.  Almost primeval.  It was not a cry about my potential demise or a fear of disease.  It's not even about me.  I am not afraid of death for myself, not because I have nothing to live for, but because I believe death is easy on the dying.  The pain is for those left behind.   

My cry was mostly about my husband.  One promise I made him when we got married was that I will sit next to him when his time comes and hold his hand, that I will give him that comfort. I am far from being a perfect wife, but I have always thought that this is one promise I could confidently fulfill.   The thought of not fulfilling that promise is unbearable.  The thought of becoming a mill stone around his neck instead is beyond despair.  He gave up a lot to be with me, and I would hate to see him cheated out of one promise I made to him, and one promise I thought I was perfectly capable of delivering on.

He, as usual, is unbelievably gentle and supportive. I have always thought that if we were to part, the blame would be on me because he has always been the text book example of what a supportive spouse should be.  Meanwhile, I am a wife from Mars - that sums it up for our relationship: a husband from Venus and a wife from Mars.  

After a while we walked through the door.  Jon was watching  TV, blissfully ignorant about all this.  In five days, there will be an entirely different reality for him, when he learns about what is going on.  The veneer of normalcy is disorienting, and precarious.