Tag: hope

Light, Hope and Moth Wings

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It’s an understatement to say November 10th was a terrible day.

It’s the date Jim was handed a radiologist’s report and read the words “metastatic disease.” And then the devastated two of us headed out of a Boston hospital into a cold, black early night.  If any color seeped from that night’s sunset, I didn’t see it.

No light.  No hope.

If that day had not come as it did, engendering all the days in between, then this year I would not have found myself celebrating the November 10th birthday of a little girl who hadn’t yet been born on that deeply dark day.

I met her mom only because the universe’s butterfly wing machinations somehow had deposited the two of us on the same stage last spring to tell our stories about “Coming Home.”  Her story was about bringing her newborn daughter home from the hospital. Mine was about bringing my husband home to die, four endless short months after that November 10th.

And after watching her daughter blow out the candles on her Elmo cake–flickering lights laced with wishes, the very definition of hope–I headed back to a new home Jim never saw, complete with a puppy he never knew.

Within sight of the same Boston hospital where my young husband received the news he certainly would soon die, I caught a glimpse of old and new perfectly lit by a stunning sky.  The sunset lingered, turning to bright orange and purple.  Violet light burst from the base of my favorite bridge. Its cables fanned out against the lipstick sunset, echoing Old Ironsides’ gorgeously complicated rigging.

Even on this day, it’s impossible not to feel buoyed by such a sight.

Oh, and my lovely little friend, born November 10, is Lucia Esperanza.

Light and hope.

“Has anything else changed?”

The way my husband lived with dying somehow took away all my lifelong fears—all but the fear of his suffering and of his death, and of life without him.

He planned a final family vacation for us during his last season.  Short months before his diagnosis he had  finally coaxed me onto a plane with our daughters, and I was still white-knuckled with terror of flying.  Although he wisely did not forewarn me that each leg of the final family-of-six trip would involve four separate plane rides, I discovered that after four decades I was no longer afraid of flying.

He needed someone to be able to give him subcutaneous injections at home when he no longer could do it, and he needed carefully-mapped sequences of injections through his port.  I discovered then that I no longer was afraid of needles.  How could I be, after what he had been through?

He needed to know I’d be able to handle the complicated finances for getting four children through college, and I very nearly conquered my fear of his elaborate financial computer system.

He was not afraid of his own death.  I never got there, but, as he told me, the two of us are made of different stuff.

 

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