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?