Why do words fail me....

     I find myself in an odd circumstance today, I am as a writer at a loss of words to begin to describe to you my readers and followers (if I have any left after months of no posting) what I'm really feeling today. If you have followed this blog any length of time you all know by now how hard of a time I have with the month of December since the death of my partner Ron Rooy in 2002. This year marks ten years that he has been gone and today marks the the day of the anniversary we entered hospice care.

     From the time we entered hospice care until he died was only ten days.  The days ending December 21, 2002 and forever altering who I am at my core.  First let me say I would have never have been able to keep him at home, and let him die at home without help.  First his daughter Christina who was there for part of it, despite having very small children at the time, Frank D'Angelo, Ken Walrath, Annette Tabar, my mother, Brian Fabo and of course the nurses and staff of Western Reserve Hospice.  It is amazing you never forget the small details.

     They say that with time, that the wounds of death become less, well that my friends is a HUGE lie!  It does not become less it becomes different and in some ways, and especially for me it is becoming more painful as the years pass.

      This year marks ten years since Ron died and, we were together four months short of ten years---so in reality he has been dead as long as we were together.  How do I sit here at my laptop and begin to describe to you what that feels like.

     I am forgetting what he smelled like when he first got of the shower as he stood at the bathroom mirror naked and shaving.  I am forgetting the feel of his hand in mine, the touch of and feel of him in bed next to me as we slept.  I am forgetting the taste of his lips on mine in the morning when we first woke.  I am forgetting what his voice sounded like when he told me he loved me.  The pain of this happening in in a word--- brutal!

     But in all honesty I can not ever forget how I felt when I was with him.  I can not forget how easy he was to talk to, to spend time with or how easily he could make me laugh.  The feel of his hands on me when he made love to me--- those sweet, tender passionate moments sitting in bed on Sunday mornings with the paper and breakfast in bed as we just shared our lives, our hopes, our dreams, our secrets.  I can not forget that he more than anyone made me value the life I have.

     To lose someone like that, not just a lover, or a husband but also your best friend does something to you, it dramatically changes you forever and realizing that this last February we would had been together twenty years was very painful.  I sit here this morning in tears knowing I would still be with him today if I just had the chance.  That even today, ten years later I love him more than ever and I always will. 

     But he only lives in memory.  Am I as the widower the only one who feels the way I do?  Am I the only one who feels that part of my very being is buried with him?  I think a lot about him and what he would have to say about my life and what it is today.  Would he be proud of me?  What advice would he give me?

     I have to admit that I pray to him all the time, my own patron saint--- my own connection to the divine--- I just wish as he said "You will feel me when the wind blows against the back of your neck"---  I need the wind to blow to guide me, lead me and direct my feet to the path I should take.  I need to know that he is proud of what I am becoming, and of what I want to do.

     It sad in so many ways that in many regards I have distanced myself from the life I had, and it has been a huge mistake.... but maybe life does go on, we change, we grow, we adapt and I am not longer the thirty-six year-old man whose partner had died.  I am now his widower, the keeper of his life, his legacy and I am so very very grateful that i have been blessed with that enormous responsibility.

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?

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?