Join us for Tokii Tales, stories of love, partnership, happy endings and sad endings. Please send me your stories. We may be able to use them, we’ll seek out experts to share their feedback with you and the rest of the Tokii community, so together we all learn and grow. If you have something to share with the writer of the story, please add a comment below.
Join us for Tokii Tales, stories of love, partnership, happy endings and sad endings. Please send me your stories. We may be able to use them, we’ll seek out experts to share their feedback with you and the rest of the Tokii community, so together we all learn and grow. If you have something to share with the writer of the story, please add a comment below.
I still get mad at her and she’s been gone for over a year.”Gone!” What a stupid way to say it. She’s dead and it makes me so mad. It was all totally stupid, she made the decision without even consulting me.
When diagnosed with cancer, I was scared. Who wouldn’t be? I’ll admit I was completely self-centred, and my treatment consumed our life. She was great, so calm and so reassuring, totally there for me through the surgery, the vomiting from the chemo and the hair loss from radiation. A picture perfect wife, who didn’t bother to tell me that she had found a lump.
I was so self-absorbed that I didn’t know that she found it, had it biopsied and that the small tumour was cancerous. It was only later that I found out her doctor advised her to deal with it right away, that although likely slow moving, there were no assurances.She made the decision to wait until the worst of my treatments were over.
It wasn’t slow moving. It was fast, far too fast and the treatments were ineffective. Eighteen months from diagnosis to death.
How can you ever be ready for that. Our marriage wasn’t perfect, but my memories of it are. I want her back so that I can do the work that I should have done while she was alive. I want a chance to make reality match the way I chose to remember it now. It’s so much easier to be angry at her. The anger gets me through the days, but at night when I lay on my side, put my arm under her pillow the way I always used to, the anger doesn’t hold together. I don’t want the kids to hear me cry, so I bury my face in her pillow until it’s wet against my skin. That part is new. I hope that the crying doesn’t last long, I hate it more than the anger. I don’t want to be angry at her for leaving, anymore, but it’s easier to direct it at her, than to be angry at me, for being so caught up in my cancer story, that I only noticed how she met my needs and nothing about her, until it was too late.
There are some days when I want to shout at the world, hit something. I’m a carpenter. It’s a relief when I hurt myself while working. A bleeding cut, is a welcome distraction from the hurt of missing her.
I just don’t know what to do.
Mark
