It Has Been Quiet

Thanks for being patient with me and waiting for my blog to reappear. My husband David passed away. Cancer was more powerful than we were, more powerful than the medical system, more powerful than prayer, positive thinking, and healthy eating. It was more powerful than everything we threw at it. The cancer was slow going at first. We did our jobs, I wrote, we visited our daughter. We waited for special treatments and miracles while proactively working towards healing. By September of 2015 the cancer was growing at an alarming rate and no treatments were slowing it down. On October 24, 2015 David took his last breath.

The quiet overwhelmed us.

At his request, David died at home, with dignity. Our daughter and I were with him. His last words were “I love you.” He said it one last time to our daughter and one last time to me. If we had to write the script for David’s death, it was as good as it could be.

In the months that followed, those famous five stages of grief have rotated through and around me. There are more than five stages, they are not continuous, and they are not in any particular order. They still come in waves that crash around me. In the meantime, life must go on. And so it does, quietly and without fanfare.

David was very self-contained. He didn’t need a lot of social interaction and was content with the three of us. I have always been a social person yet I found myself content in his world, too. There would be days with just David, our daughter, and I. Those were good days.

My job is full of emails and a few phone calls but not many people. I can go hours in silence, with just the clicking of the keyboard to keep me company. I come home to an empty nest, my daughter is an adult and off at college. David is gone. The quiet is broken by the meowing of the cat when she is hungry. Today the quiet is calming, today I don’t need any noise.