How it started

My husband died almost three months ago. Since then (and before that, actually) on most days, I have a faint nausea that doesn’t go away. I have a hard time falling asleep and on the nights when I fall asleep easily, I have a hard time staying asleep. In fact, it’s been some time since I slept more than four hours straight.

I know what I’m experiencing is quite common for anyone grieving – especially for a new widow. It’s also common for your appetite to go awry – some people eat more and others eat less. But, despite all the similarities we might share when we grieve, pretty much all the literature/groups/experts agree that every person’s journey and experience with grief will be unique. To be honest, that last bit of news makes me a little nervous.

I’m a list person. I want someone to give me a list with all the emotions or experiences I must have in order to get over my grief. I know that such a list doesn’t exist but this doesn’t stop me from still wanting it. Even though I know it doesn’t work that way, I want to be able to have something that I can use to measure my progress so that I can see how much grieving I have left. When I was a sophomore in college, I wrote out every class that I needed to take until graduation and in what semester I planned to take them. I even went so far as to calculate my GPA based on the likely grades that I would get (I got a C in my first semester and became obsessed with getting the highest GPA possible after that.) This strategy helped me push through when I could see that I only had x number of classes left. I know grief doesn’t work this way but man, do I wish it did.

The cause of my husband’s death was cancer. It seemed to come out of nowhere. It felt like our life was moving along just fine when all of the sudden he developed a nagging pain in his side that we blamed on everything from gas to his new chair at work. We thought that because his new work schedule included long hours on video calls, his body must be rebelling against his lack of movement. We tried adjusting his diet and incorporating exercise but after several weeks of no success, we decided it was best if he saw our family doctor. I thought he had an ulcer and he thought he had gallstones. We were both wrong. It was cancer.

By the time we got the diagnosis, a full liver transplant was his only hope. We were living in Germany at the time so the first question we asked ourselves was where we should seek treatment – there or back home in the United States. At the onset, my husband and I didn’t agree on this, which was rare since we agreed on just about everything. He didn’t want to leave his kids (totally understandable) and I didn’t want him to be pushed to the back of the line of transplant recipients because he was American. If someone had given us a little more than, “I don’t know how long it takes to get a transplant because I’m not God and can’t tell you when a matching donor is going to die,” I might have considered treatment in Germany. But God bless ‘em, Germans can engineer an automobile like it’s nobody’s business but customer service or bedside manners are not their forté.

At the time, it felt like ages between the initial diagnosis and our arrival in the United States but when I look back at a calendar, I’m surprised to see that it was only a little over two weeks. My perception of time has been all jacked up since then. Things feel either much longer than they are or time seems to slip my more quickly but I can’t seem to be on equal footing with what is actually taking place.

Immediately after our arrival in the USA, he had a full assessment complete with a new CT scan and MRI. We waited patiently for the doctors to tell us that the German hospital had made a mistake or that our German was clearly not strong enough to understand what the doctors had said and that the tests had all revealed a nuisance, but nothing truly life threatening. But that’s not at all what they said. What we found out, was that from the get go, he was at stage four and any and all treatment plans recommended were solely for the purpose of keeping him comfortable.

Despite the bad news, he started chemotherapy right away and we prayed like nobody’s business. We had hope for a miracle. I reached out to my friends and asked them to light candles and say prayers for us. I envisioned a chain of prayer requests going around the world and believed that the more times it circled the globe, the stronger our request and the stronger our request, the more likely we were to be heard – and healed, of course. Within a few days, there were candles and prayers across Europe, Asia, and North America.

Fast forward two months and we were now under the care of a new doctor in a new state. Every doctor we saw along the way gave us a version of information we'd already heard: His cancer was rare. It was aggressive. It was incurable. It was terminal. He was not eligible for a transplant and of course, none of the treatments appeared to be working.

I saw the fear in my husband’s eyes and for as much as I tried to be strong throughout this period, I cried every day and every night. We held each other when we could and talked about how much we loved our life, all the things we were grateful for, and how lucky we felt to have found each other. We heard the doctors but wanted to believe that God had other plans. Sadly, he didn’t. Jaundice set in sometime in mid-September – about three months into this nightmare – and my husband died on October 19.

I am well aware that I am one of the lucky ones. I was able to say everything I needed to say and I heard everything I hoped to hear. In fact, we got to the point where there was nothing more to say. I told him how much I was going to miss him and asked him to contact me from the other side if that was in any way possible.

This whole experience has been the most painful thing I have ever gone through in my life and sometimes, I’m surprised that I’m still here. Before my husband died, I began having panic attacks at night that came on just from envisioning a life without him. But for as much as it hurts, whatever I envisioned was much worse. That’s not to say that I don’t cry or that it’s not horrible, because I do and it is. In fact, I’m balling my eyes out right now. But for some reason, I’m able to feel that I’m going to be ok. I can’t quite see it yet and I know that it’s a dark and lonely path between now and when I can finally feel healed – if there is such an “end” point – but I know that it’s out there in the future somewhere. I just have to find it. That’s what this blog is about.