A Very Tough Day

This has been a very tough day......a year ago today Sandi came home her final time just after six in the evening. It was the beginning of hospice ... and the beginning of the end. I did not want her here as I was very afraid of what was coming and not being able to care for her as she needed and deserved. That turned out to be the reality as after about a week they lost pain control and she suffered horribly before lapsing into unconsciousness those last few days. It was hell for her and for us too.

Sandi, on the other hand, did not want to die in the hospital. She desperately wanted to be at home in the quiet here with us. I agreed as that was what she wanted and tehre was no way I could tell her no. In a sense she is still here as her ashes sit in her urn on the bedroom bureau in my room. At some point I will join her and the boys can decide what to do with us.

In the meantime, we grind closer to Thanksgiving. A day we spent more often than not in the hospital since she was first diagnosed on Thanksgiving Day 2011. I still remeber the doctors and how they made a ring around her bed and then slowly broke the news. In a few minutes our future toegther exploded and fragmented in a thousand different ways. I don't rember much about what they said, but I do remeber her swearing that she was not done and that she would beat it. She did everything she could to do so. Sandi fought and made it a lot longer than anyone had ever though possible since that day she was diagnosed. She beat the odds again and again and made it for six years.

I wish she had made a seventh. I wish for so much that can't be......and I miss her so much. Every day is hard....some are worse than others....and then there are days like today when it is so incredibly soul crushingly brutal. It built on last night when I sat in Green Hall at UTD and thought about how often Sandi, pregnant with Scott, sat there waiting for me back in that final semester of 93 and how proud she would be of him now and everything. Before I knew it, I had started crying in front of a dozen or so 20 somethings who had no idea what to do with the blubbering fat man. Today I have managed to keep from crying in public today as we ran errands. But, the water works have poured out here at home several times including as I try to write this post.

How I am going to get through the next two weeks, let alone another Christmas and all, I have no idea. Somehow, I will. But, as I said on Facebook the other day, if I could take a pill and sleep through the next three months and skip all of it, I would. I would swallow that pill in a heartbeat and the side effects be damned.

Reality hurts like hell. Again.....