I wasn’t feeling well the other night. Running a slight temp maybe and achy. It ended up being a restless night with my husband up a few times to fetch an ice pack and ibuprofen for me. From my prospective it felt so nice to be able to be sick and not have to take care of myself. Having someone to rub my back and bring me a glass of water was such a change from years just previous when being ill was not any different from being well in that I was still having to take care of everything. This last spring I had a couple of sinus infections that flattened me a bit, but my daughter still needed to get to school in the morning and be picked up in the afternoon. Laundry didn’t do itself. Nor did the shopping or the house cleaning. And most of all, I didn’t get any of the real rest I needed to recover properly. 

Rob’s perspective though was far different.

He was very quiet all the next day, and we didn’t get much of a chance to talk until the evening as we were hauling furniture to Jordan’s new home in a little boomtown a about 2 hours south of us. But later when we did talk, he told me that my being sick had scared him, and that he couldn’t help but draw parallels between me and his late wife. I knew that anniversaries were coming. It is going on 11 months now, and he has been somewhat quiet about it all. From my own experiences, I knew also that the last weeks and days are etched on every fiber of your being and are more just memories. Your body remembers and reacts to the last days even when you have no conscious  thoughts to prod them. And I wish I could do something other than just listen. I wish I was more physically recovered from my own years of care-taking that a bit of missed sleep or a string of hot, humid days didn’t trigger my allergies or asthma. It makes him uneasy . Like most of us who lost spouses to long term disease, he thinks he should have seen the signs earlier or known enough to avoid the missteps that sometimes happen when you are navigating a healthcare system that sees the disease and not the person and is often more interested in the disease as a puzzle to solve and to learn from for the next time. It is hard to know that your loved one was just a another patient and is now just another statistic. You can’t turn off that need to be one step ahead and to be better this time. Faster. Smarter. In control. But the thing is that you were never in control, and the outcome had already been decided. You did exactly what you were put there to do. 

I don’t know how to reassure him any more than I know how to reassure myself. I have similar worries about him. I don’t know how a person could not. And I marvel at how we have pushed beyond these fears enough to risk losing again when it is still so fresh in our minds. But, life is inherently risky. Even if you never venture beyond confines of your own home, there is risk. You can’t cocoon yourself away from it, and who is the more foolish anyway? Those who stand back from the raging river thinking they are safer than those who take to the rafts to ride it. They forget that rivers can jump their banks and swallow land and lives for miles around them whenever they choose.

Today, we are back to our normal. Katy is dressed in her Tigger costume and watching cartoons. Rob is using an online crossword dictionary to finish yesterday’s puzzle, and I am blogging. There are groceries to get in town and dinner to plan because Farron is driving out for a visit. This is life most of the time, and we need to focus on the living of it more and the worry about the loss of it a bit less. Fortunately, we have a damn long time to do this.