December 11th- Anniversary

As many of you, who have been reading this blog a long time---- know that today is the anniversary day my previous partner, Ron, went into Hospice Care after 16 1/2 yrs of living with AIDS he just could not recover. 

Eleven short days later on December 21, 2002 he was dead. 

Somehow that day has now become NINE painful years later.  It is hard sitting here talking about this, all this time later but what very few GET is how this one single event still plays itself out in everyday life.

There isn't a day that goes by without my thinking about him in someway shape for form.  What would he be doing, what would he be saying, what would he be thinking?  Would we still be involved battling AIDS as much as we were?  I do know  one thing we would still be together, no doubt about it.

I miss him more than ever, the way his smile used to fill a room, the way you could hear him laughing in a theatre full of people, the way he felt in bed next to me.  The things he used to do, used to say and well simply just exist.  I think that is the hardest part of all of it, in all of this time later I have nearly forgoten all of those things, it is like I am losing him all over again.

I know some would say I shouldn't be dwelling on it, I should get over it, I should move on, I "have this great life"--well I say don't judge a book by its cover!  Like Forrest Gump "That's all I have to say" about that part of it.

I was in our old neigborhood , this last week; to have my quarterly blood-work and the house is till empty, the owner has apparently abandoned it and moved back to Belguim.  The windows and doors are all boarded up and---I stood on our old porch longing to go in just one more time.  Longing to be in the dining room where he died, leaving me for ever...the pain has not gotten any easier.  Tears flooded my eyes as I remembered standing in the street barefoot, in my jammies watching them load the gurney into the hearse, the windhowling and snow screaming in the wind.

This year has been very hard with mother having 4 mini-strokes in a matter of five months.  It left her a shell of a woman, barely able to walk, blind in one eye and a conversation window of about 5 sentences per visit.  My mother was the one that told me Ron had died, as I --after 11 days of 4 hours of sleep--fell asleep.

There is just still so much pain, and no one to talk too about it. When does the hurt go away, when can you move on? I have said it before in other posts about this time of the year that more or less Christmas has become a time of the year I dread.  I am beginning to wonder if I am alone in that feeling?

A Very Painful Visit

I am not sure I want to exactly share this story, but there is a big part of me that feels like I need to just to get it off my chest and by doing so I might be able to deal with it better---who knows for sure.

As many of you know who read here regularly, you also know that tomorrow is the anniversary of the death of Ron.  Eight years tomorrow and somehow, someway the pain is still so tremendously unbearable beyond words.

I decided to drive this afternoon out to Eastlawn Cemetery in Brunswick, Ohio where he is buried. I decided to go alone, spend some time by myself. It isn't all that far from where we live maybe thirty-five minutes.  It was one of those drives where I didn't turn on the radio, I wanted surrounded by my thoughts and emotions and nothing else.  I was crying before I even got there.  That should have been my warning sign.

I pulled into the cemetery and into the section where he is buried, stopped, and put the car into park.  The emotions just engulfed every pore of my being.  It was this tsunami of unbearable deep horrific pain.  It was like being there eight years ago.  I could still see the bundled and huddled crowd, the tent, the hearse, the coffin, the blowing wind whisking the snow and well I completely lost it.  I sat in the car for an hour and half and just literally wept myself uncontrollably sick.  I couldn't move, I never opened the car door, I never got out, I never got to the grave.  I just sat their and wept bitterly and deeply, grief unthinkable and I feel like I am the only one that feels that way.

I am the only one that visits that grave, I am the only one still so unbearably distraught, that I could not even get out of the car.  I got the car in gear and just drove away, tears still in my eyes, the emptiness pervaded and I felt so ashamed of myself for what happened there.  Feeling so alone, feeling like I couldn't talk about any of it.

All this time later and it seems no better, no less it just seems no one wants to talk about it, or hear about it or even think about it.  People wonder why I hate Christmas now and this is it and no other reason.  He died just four days before a holiday I loved, a holiday we celebrated to the hilt and he was so viciously and violently ill those last days and he died so gruesomely I was haunted by nightmares for months.  The bloody vomiting, the bleeding KS sores, the unconsciousness and his grief over what happened with New Hope.  He felt like he wasted so much time by working for so long and so much, it felt like he wasted us and what we could have had.  I had no idea what to say, I still don't all this time later.

Do I feel better sharing--honestly I am not so sure, ask me in a few days.  Until then I am so glad we had this time together

Serious Thought for the day

As many of you who have been reading this blog a long time know that today is the anniversary day my previous partner, Ron, went into Hospice Care after 16 1/2 yrs of living with AIDS he just could not recover.  Eleven short days later on December 21, 2002 he was dead.  Many ways, I have never been the same since and probably never will be.  Until last night while reading "Losing Julia" by Jonathan Hull I felt like no one understand what that feeling was like then I read.......

"One person dies and the whole world looks sadder, hollowed out  so that you hear echos in places where there aren't supposed to be any.  Each passing day and month and year is an accumulation of absences; of people, places and events that a loved one will never see or know about.  When you have suffered a terrible loss you look at things and think: I wonder what he would have made of that?  Wouldn't he have enjoyed this and oh G-d he would have hated that and shit this reminds me of him.

When people die it's as though the earth itself opens briefly and swallows them up.

The last thing people do when they die is to change all the people who loved them.  I can still feel the dead reverberating through my own life, sometimes with the delicacy of ripples on a pond, other times with the force of shock waves.  And the strangest thing is how much talking the dead still do; talking in our heads.  I've actually grown quite fond of it.

But I can't shake the sadness. Sometimes nostalgia swamps me like a flash flood and leaves me floating face down amid the flotsam of the past.  Not the nostalgia that comes with the change of the seasons--which is as good as sad gets: a rusty, blood red if you gave it a color--but deeper, more funereal longing.  Melancholy if you will."

I haven't cried like that in a long time or felt so lonely in my life, but also like finally words were given to what I really felt.  What I really needed to say.  Someone got me and in a big way.  Eight years ago today, where has the time gone?  His voice fading from my memory, but those memories just as alive and fresh and real as they were all those years ago.

So my thought for the day is do you feel that this section from "Losing Julia" adequately describes what you have gone through in having someone you love die?

Thoughts of today

I am a gigantic believer in the idea that our past experiences, our past lives, and the things we have learned along the way have made what we are as people today.  I think some people may disagree with me on this, but I really in the depths of my soul know beyond a doubt that without our pasts we are nothing.

I am not talking about living in the past, or not accepting ad embracing what we have currently.  What I am saying is we can not forget where we come from, and what we are made of.  It can be a wonderful experience, it can be happiness and rainbows but it also be very painful and be a real big stinking bitch as well.

Today would have been my 18th wedding anniversary to Ron, and I know many of you would say "Charlie, you have Jim, embrace what you have" and I can accept that and I understand where you are coming from but my thought today is without that meeting, and without that 10 year relationship I would not even be here today.

When I met Ron, my doctor said I had a year or less to live.  I was very ill, I weighed a mere 128 pounds and kids a size 27 inch waist on me was scary as hell.  I changed my diet almost the minute I moved in with Ron.  I added alternative therapies to my life.  I changed doctors, changed my medications and for the second time in my life went into rehab.  My drug of choice up until that point was painkillers and vodka.  I was a mess, and I frankly if I have to be honest didn't give a shit.

We lived together a year before we had our commitment ceremony. Even though it was over 100 degrees that day and I was in the hospital emergency room with kidney stones that week, that day all these years later is still as vivid in my mind as if it were yesterday.  It wasn't easy trying to find who I was living with AIDS then.  Frankly it wasn't so much about living with AIDS as it was in my mind, "I am dying from AIDS".  I literally thought it would or could happen at any moment.  Emotionally I think I was worse than I was physically and somehow, someway Ron saw past all that and saw the person I could be.

We had our share of problems, he was a workaholic and I, well I was and in many ways still am co-dependant.  I wasn't happy if he wasn't happy.  I was a "stay at home wife" and was happy doing nothing more than that.  We entertained quiet a bit all those years and we could have those long, meaningful talks that lasted for hours that frankly I miss the most.  I have been hard pressed to find that kind of openness since then.

He was so handsome at the end of the aisle that day, his smile so big as he stomped on the wine glass as our friends cheered Mazel Tov.  We laughed so much that day, its the big thing I remember all these years later.  Unfortunately a lot of those friendships didn't last, some moved away, some moved one, some even died-- I don't think other than my family there is anyone in my life right now that was there that day.  That hurts beyond words and it makes my heart heavy.

It was 7 months short of our 10th anniversary when he died, and it wasn't just losing a partner it was literally losing my very best friend.  He knew me inside and out, he knew things no one else has ever known about me since.  When he died we were the type of couple that could and often did complete each others sentences.  The bottom fell out and watching him literally wither away before my eyes.  I can not begin to describe the kind of pain that leaves on your soul.  The man you share a life with dying weighing only 95 pounds and not being able to communicate in any way the last 6 days of his life.

Somehow life goes on, how I am still trying to figure out.  I never want to forget where I have been, what it has made out of me and how very much I cherish what I have now.  Jim thinks I cling to much to this kind of thinking as wellas to the past and that I miss what is right in front of me.  I tend to think it enriches it.

Would I do it all over again knowing exactly what I know now---without a doubt yes!  People cross our lives and they leave if we are lucky their imprints in our lives and I was and am deeply blessed for those who have touched my life.  Happy Anniversary---------------