Three Years

[burdell]

Originally Posted by Dwatted Wabbit

September 28, 2020, that's when my wife slipped these earthly bounds. It was a short emergency. ER on the 18th after she was clearly suffering enormous pain for months. I begged her to go to a doc in the box or ER, but no.
So, ER on the 18th, ICU on the 19th. hospice on the 23rd. On the morning of the 28th I received a call--COVID, very limited visiting hours--that she was gone. Unfortunately she was pretty doped up on pain meds so our communication was limited her entire stay at those facilities.

Her daughter--whom I'd never met and I've later realized why--and her BF were here. They picked up a lot of my wife's stuff, she was yooj into crafts and was an eBay regular and was all over many crafting sites--that I had no need for and the daughter did. So that was good.

Then things got ugly, we ended up in court and the good guys won. As my attorney said we would. It was very ugly and it dragged on for months. Which I guess for court that's not so long. But it destroyed the grieving process, which I'm quite familiar with. One of the best college classes I took was Death and Dying. I later worked as a hospice social worker, and after that as a hospice volunteer. So I was familiar with that road. But no classic grief process occurred for my wife's departure.

It did, later, when one of our cats, Molly, grew ill with an eye disorder. I went to four vets, nobody had Clue #1 that it was cancer. I saw a Dr. Pol (TV veterinarian) rerun many months ago, a horse was brought in to his practice with a red bloody eye.

"Oh, I call that cancer eye!" So four local vets with probably 80-100 years' experience between them and nobody had a clue? Molly was where I got my grieving in, it was a struggle and going to vet after vet and it was either a new scrip for eye drops, or one substitute vet said she'd remove the diseased eye AND Molly's other eye. Yes, let's totally blind a 19 year old cat. Good help is really hard to find.

But the time leading to when I took Molly in for her journey over The Rainbow Bridge was a big grief process. So I guess that substituted for what I didn't have when my wife died, because that was just war afterwards.

Now I have another sick, surely terminal kitty. River, also 19. Vet said he guessed bone cancer. He did not confirm that with X-rays. Huh?
I asked a friend who's run a medical lab for 20+ years give me his take on her blood work and he said the only thing he saw was anemia. So there ya go.

So I've been nursing River along, making sure she has fresh food and lots of TLC. She's a very sweet baby.

To complete this rambling, a few days ago a George Jones song popped into my mind. He Stopped Loving Her Today. That man is one soul singer. And the song is about an ex husband dying. He loved his ex until his dying day, if you don't know the song.
I don't think love dies with physical death, as the song says, but that is an amazingly soulful song and sometimes sad songs help in sad times. I played it a few times today.

Ramble over. Anniversary is near.

Perhaps little consolation while the loss is still fresh but I just finished reading a book titled Proof of Life after Life and it makes a pretty good argument that there is something good in store for us all. I found it interesting that descriptions of essentially near death experiences from ancient Greece are pretty much identical to what we hear of the same experiences today. Many folks who've 'died' and been brought back tell almost identical stories of the 'life review', of seeing their entire lives go by, not in a critical 'you're a horrible human being' way but more in the line of ways to improve yourself.

At any rate it's given me a different perspective of friends and family who no longer walk the earth and a belief that may perhaps sound a bit cliche but this book seems very well researched by an M.D. and while I want to research things a little more myself, I'm truly starting to believe that they've actually all gone to a 'better place'.