300 nights ago.

I’m standing outside in the dark. The cool chill has crept into the air and it’s the season of fire pits and rambling conversations over a glass of Shiraz.

300 nights ago. That's where I am.
300 nights ago- he is still here.

He knows that his time is slipping fast through the hourglass of remaining moments and hours that are allocated his. He knows.

I’m standing outside and it’s dark. It’s cold tonight. Inside the house, the lights are on and there is movement. The flow and ebb, the lull and the chaos of dinnertime.

She is standing in the kitchen. Pouring a glass of wine. She tilts her head to the side and listens for the shower. He can’t stand up and shower anymore. He is just so very tired. The sallow in his face has snuck in and settled, severe and apparent over the past weeks. She listens and knows that he is sitting on the shower chair- letting the warmth and the solitude of a veil of warm water soothe him.

I’m watching her- the strain of knowing he is leaving soon is etched so deeply into her face. Into the lines around her tired eyes. Into the set of her mouth.

I am her.

She is me.

I am outside.. Standing in the dark and I see her.

She sips the wine and closes her eyes for just a moment as it slides in warmth down her clenched throat. She can’t relax. He is having such a bad day. The morphine isn’t enough to ease the pain that he is in. He is tired and in pain. She calculates how much more morphine she will give him so that he can rest. Her life is dosage and medication and watching him fade.

I reach out my hand towards the cool glass of the window. I know her. She is me and I can see her. The pain of his going is etched deeply tonight.

“It’s going to get bad…” I want to whisper to her. But I can’t and I won’t. Let her think that tonight and the moments she is enduring now are the hardest parts. This pain that he is in… The slow goodbye, bittersweet and heartbreaking.

“So much worse..”  I would whisper.

 

I look around the room- people are there and they love her fiercely. They are beside her as she walks this goodbye. It is their goodbye as well- they love him wholeheartedly. He is loveable.

I know the way they love her, this me who is watching her great love fade away, because they love me in my now just like they loved me on this night.

The shower stops and she puts down her wine suddenly, so that it spills on the bench. Her movements are hurried as she steps around the kitchen bench and goes towards the bedroom. Eyes follow her and she slips into the room.

I’m standing outside. It’s cold tonight and he is going.

He is leaving her.

He left me.

I can see her, this me who is heartsick with the longing to never let him go.

I know her.

It’s been nearly a year since I was her. Hundreds of days and nights since those hours we spent around the fire pit with our people. Those hours and moments of saying goodbyes in each kiss, each smile, each whispered conversation late at night. Bodies turned towards each other, her fingers stroking and memorising the contours of his face.

The bedroom door opens and he leans heavily against the wall. The soft shuffle in his slow stride moves him forward to the chair that is left unoccupied for him. He is tired. The final fade has arrived- He knows.

I’m standing outside and I see him. The way he slowly lowers his failing body into the chair. The way she lingers slightly to make sure that he is comfortable enough. The way she fixes a smile onto her face, and gives him a cheeky mouthful about something.

He knows. He knows that he is leaving her.

She walks past him and his eyes follow her. They follow that me who I am watching. She picks up her wine and takes another sip. He watches her and his eyes close in a heavy weariness.

I can see them.

Walking towards this end with no option but to be together.

No option but to face it with a determined stride.

But I know.

I know that she is not determined.

Or brave.

Or strong.

Or inspiring.

She is broken.

Broken hearted that he is going.

This.

This is what we have in common- this her and this me.

Her broken heart is his going.

My broken heart is him gone.

I see them. My people.

The house full of people. Leaning into talk to him because he still has so very much to say.

He always had so much to say.  I smile at the way she purposefully disagrees with him- just to get a bite.
He knows what she is doing and plays along.

I see them. And I’m suddenly overcome with the desire to bang on this frosted window and scream at them-

“This is the best part of a goodbye… his being here. He is here and you are not alone!!”

I want to grab her and let her see the hollow place in my eyes. The hundreds of days that have rolled past since this night that I am watching from outside have left a hollowed place deep in my eyes and I want her to see it.

But I won’t.

Let them think that this is the hardest part.

Let them think that.

I don’t want to walk away. I want to stay here, in the cold night and keep watching this house, my house on a night 300 nights ago. 

I want to watch the way she walks past him and brushes his hair away from his forehead before she leans in to give him a kiss. I know her. I am her. I see her and I want to be her again. Because when I was her, I had him.

 

But I turn.

I turn and it is over. She is gone- she has become this me.

And the hundreds of nights disappear and I am here. Tonight.

 

The lounge room is quiet and dark when I look again.

Hundreds of days and nights have slipped past and the kitchen is silent.

The chairs are empty.

 

He is gone.

And my heart loves him still. That will be unchanging and unchangeable.

And she is gone.

That tired carer.

That tireless and weary woman who lived each day waiting for him to leave her.

She is gone and she is now me. This Suz.

 

That’s what has happened. The hundreds of days that have slipped past since those nights of our long goodbye have meant that she, that woman who loved to brush back his hair from his forehead, has had to learn what life is like on the other side of a goodbye.

 

There are no titles that she wants as she has become me.

Widow doesn’t suit her.

Single is too final for her liking.

Alone is scary.

Single mum is scarier.

 

“Just Suz- that’s what I want to be” has been her thoughts as she has stepped into these new moments.

Suz- who loves to laugh uproariously and who is irreverent at inopportune times.

Suz- who is a little lost sometimes but mostly found in the network of people who love her fiercely.

Suz- who isn’t quite sure what grief looks like or how it is meant to work, but does know that sometimes her heart is about ready to burst open with the enormous immensity of the way that it aches. And other times its perfectly content in the days that are unfolding.

Suz- who needs to be loved. She always has- she always will.

Suz- who is constantly amazed that she parents these sons. These sons who have so many reasons to hate the world, and yet who are the first to forgive and the loudest to cheer her on as she stumbles and stuffs up.

Suz- who will continue to make decisions about these new days and hope to high heaven that they are actually the right ones. And if they aren’t, then at least that she would have the fortitude to own them. Learn and move on.

Suz- who misses being his wife. Who misses the ebb and flow of a life that was ours.

Suz- who knows that she will one day be a wife again… one day.  And she knows that great joy will find a home in her heart once more.

If I could go back, step into the past- here is what I would tell her. That me from a couple of hundred nights ago… I would whisper to her as I held her tight in her tired, weary brokenness:

 “You will hurt. And you will heal.

You will drink too much and you will hate to be hungover.

You will rage in the lonely hours of the night and you will hate the world.

You will find joy in meeting strangers and great delight in making friends.

You will wonder at every decision that you make, because it is weighted with the responsibility of three sons.

But Suz… You will be ok. You really, truly will. You will survive his leaving you and you will be ok.”

 300 nights have slipped past me.

I’m approaching the season of fire pits and rambling conversations over glasses of Shiraz. And I’m going to be ok.

 

 

 

The Purple Sash

The Purple Sash...

 

 

 

It’s a thin slip of silken material. It loops into a sash.

For the years that I knew him, it was a ritual that he carried out each Relay for Life day.

He would register.

Pick up his purple sash.

There was a reverence and a profound sense of thankfulness each time I watched him slip that purple sash over his head.

The purple sash declares the wearer as ‘Survivor’.

He was.

He survived- the diagnosis; that whiplash that left us reeling.
He survived- the multiple surgeries that left him scarred and alive.
He survived- the chemotherapy that came hand in hand with a mountain of difficulties.
He survived- the terminal prognosis and the grief that wrecked us.
He survived- the goodbyes that he set himself to say.

He survived.

Survive is a loaded word.

It has multiple meanings and each of them in their varied contexts belong here.

He survived in the face of looming mortality until the second he left the room and went to that distant shore.

Until he could survive no more- he survived.

Survive is a verb.

And one of the varied meanings of this doing word is to “remain alive after the death of (a particular person)’.

 

Sheldon is survived by us.

By the ones who will Relay for him tomorrow.
Sheldon is survived by his sons.

The steely determination that glints in the recesses of their eyes when they think about the scourge of cancer. That’s survival.

Sheldon is survived by the power of kindness.

Kindness in the mundane and in the exceptional.

Oh- my heart.

Oh- the emotion that lingers and presses and ebbs and flows when I think of that purple sash.

He won’t pick up a purple sash this year.

It’s left to us- we who survive him.

I will pick up my white sash tomorrow.

The ‘Carers’ sash.

And I will reverently, with a profound sense of thankfulness- slip it over my head.

The greatest privilege that I have experienced in my 37 years was to carry his children and deliver them into this life. To partner with him as parents and to give him the gift of being a father- a daddy. Oh- what an honour.

The second greatest privilege was to be the one who cared for him in those last, long, painfully raw days of his goodbye.

To be the one he whispered his last “I love you” to.

To be the one his eyes sought last before they closed a final time.

What a privilege.

What an honour to have cared for him.

Oh- my heart.

And to you- the brave and the resilient.

The scarred and the fighting.
The ones who will slip that purple sash over your head tomorrow.

I am in awe.

You are brilliance in action as you teach us how to keep walking. Through the diagnosis, the prognosis, the scars, the set backs, the celebrations, the medications…. Keep walking.

Keep walking.

Tomorrow night.

When it’s cold- and even rainy.

When it’s that moment just before dawn breaks and the birds start to rouse.

When it seems just too hard to walk another lap- then. Keep Walking.

Then- in those dark hours.. Keep walking.

That is what my survivor taught me.

No hour is too dark.

No night is too long.

Some glimmer of hope and kindness will always survive.

He is survived.

 

We need a cure...

We need a cure.

Like... we really need a cure.

I found myself telling someone today about how it actually, truly was in his final hours.

Normally I simply say- "My husband died.. Cancer."

And the "dying" part is elusive and abstract in the conversation. And that's ok.

I mean, it's not something that every conversation needs... the details.

But today- well, I don't know why, but the conversation led to details. 

Details.

Like how he was so very tired and how he fought to stay coherent.

Details.

Like how he was in pain.. and how the pain was debilitating.

Details.

Like how the relentless sound of the death rattle almost drove me to distraction. Almost.

Details.

Cancer is a thief.

It steals.

It takes what is not rightfully its to have.

It stole his breath.

It stole his strength.

It stole the vitality he faced a day with.

We need a cure.

This week, all over my city and throughout the state and nation, families received the whiplash moment of diagnosis.

Multiple people discovered a lump, or a growth..

They had blood tests and scans.

They were seated in a doctors office and looked at grainy images of that heinous thief.

This week, people reconciled 'terminal' as a term that defined their coming days.

They cried and they held a beloved hand as the realisation settled.

We need a cure.

Today I stood before another coffin.

Cancer took another breath.

Cancer stole days that it had no claim over.

Over and over again... in hospital rooms. In lounge rooms.

Surrounded by loved ones.

In funeral homes and in cemeteries. 

The cost of cancer was shouldered.

Oh....

We need a cure.

How?

How will it happen?

Well...

I resolutely, definitively hope against hope that it will happen soon.

That it will happen in this lifetime.

And because it looms... the enormity of loss and the thief that is cancer, I sometimes get overwhelmed with the... well, the enormity. And the loss.

Yes... especially the loss of his not being here. 

And I need to fight back.

I need to find a way... forward.

I need to listen to the single determination that resides in my son's voices when they talk about a tomorrow where cancer is a chronic illness, not a terminal one.

We need a cure.

As the days and months and moments pass, I find it less viscerally painful to talk about the detail of those last moments. 

I find it somewhat easier to face tomorrow without him.

I find tomorrow is going to be ok.

And in those ok tomorrows, where we laugh and find moments of joy...

In those days of fundraisers and functions.

In those moments.

In those days that approach us...

We need a cure.