I would do the same thing after the experience was over. I would think, "A week/month/year ago, we were at the hockey game in LA with the boys" and so on.
So now, I'm left with memories of what my life was like a year ago at this time. I hate doing this, and yet, I can't stop.
So, taking a deep breath, I torture myself by thinking "A year ago at this time..."
January 10, 2012 was pretty bad. Back from Christmas in San Clemente, and an uneventful New Years, Gary was feeling weak, sickly and was anemic again. As usual, he went to work every day, though. Liz, his admin assistant started buying him the same supplements that she gave her aunt who had cancer. Liz had seen on Dr Oz that these supplements would heal. She didn't know Gary had cancer- none of us did, but I started putting the pills in with Gary's other supplements. I figured, what harm can it do?
On that day, January 10th, Gary flew to the annual managers meeting in Monroe, MI. He was pale, gray, gaunt and said people commented on his weight. He acted as though he meant to lose it. He was so weak and sick, he knew he was bleeding, but had to get through the 3 days anyway. Weeks later, I asked him if he thought about bleeding out on the plane. He admitted, yes, he did wonder if he would die right then and there, and what would happen if he were dead when the plane landed in Ontario.
With a non existent immune system, Gary spent the weekend shivering on the couch in sweatshirts under blankets. By Monday January 16th, he could not hold his head up anymore.
That was the day we went to a liver specialist who read the wrong chart and read us misinformation as though it were fact. We denied everything, then she told us to cancel an appointment I had been told to make with a GI doc the next day. "The good news is you don't have liver disease!" she proclaimed. This diagnosis after she had touched his abdomen. By Wednesday, January 18th Gary was in an ambulance on his way to the hospital where he was kept for 3 days. He was so anemic that he had less than 1/3 of the red blood he should have. It had bled through the holes in the veins that ballooned in his esophagus in response to not having the ability to flow through the portal vein system. The portal vein had been choked off by the pancreatic tumor that no one thought to look for since symptoms began two months earlier.
This one year anniversary is the beginning of the ugliest time of my life. The ugliness has not lifted yet for me, but for dear sweet Gary, it is now passed. I didn't know it then, but I realize that Sadness came to live in me last January and has never left.
I continue to torture myself with these one year remembrances. I hate this but can't stop myself. My last group grief meeting last week was ended with the counselor reading about this phenomena that we impose on ourselves. Our 'year of firsts' is the 365 days following the death of our husbands. In my case, the obsession with the 'one year ago today' stuff may be a way to try to make sense of the whole way Gary's life ebbed away from him and us.
I also torture myself by thinking that a year ago Gary was the age that I am now. He had cancer. So I should have cancer now, shouldn't I? Its only fair! We were a year apart, so since he 'got' it a year ago at age 55, now its my turn to 'get' it at the same age, right?
When I outlive Gary, it will be a very hard milestone. This is just not how it was supposed to be.
To most of us memories are good, but memories brought about by measuring time are often very cruel.
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