Writing has become my primary tool this past year for processing the deaths of George and Sara. Tonight as we close in on the 1st anniversary of Sara’s death, I feel the need to write, though I sit here at my computer with no specific prompt or agenda in mind.
This time last year I was holding vigil for Sara as her body was shutting down. All day on November 1st, 2019 we had visitors, starting fairly early in the morning until around 11pm that night, people wanting to say goodbye to Sara and support the two of us. I know there were people who had wanted an opportunity to talk to Sara one last time who never got the chance, either because she was no longer conscious by the time they were able to visit, or because they weren’t able to visit before she died. My heart hurts for everyone – Sara was such a light in our world, and her loss was one felt by so many in our community. Many people didn’t know how very sick Sara was, but to be honest until the last few days she and I had been desperately clinging to hope that she would beat the cancer, and she had always tried to put on a brave face for people around her treatments and diagnosis.
Although in some respects Nov 2nd isn’t that different from every other day this last year without Sara, it does have a sense of finality to it. Around 5:30am tomorrow morning, it will have been an entire year since Sara’s living presence has touched this world. It will be a full year since she and I made any new memories together. It would have been a strange year just due to the fact that it was my first year without Sara, but when you consider the fact that the pandemic has overshadowed the last 7 months of this first year without Sara, I’m not sure I have the words to really express what it has been like. My “normal life” was obliterated when Sara died, and then this pandemic has further isolated me and denied me any sort of connection to my previous “normal”.
My soul has been reliving last year as I’ve gone through this first year without Sara. As I’ve watched the days on the calendar go by, it’s been impossible not to orient myself around what was going on on that date in 2019. The last few weeks my memories have been flooded with the experience of watching Sara slip away in the hospital – the constant tension between wanting to hold on to hope, but becoming increasingly concerned and frustrated at the lack of progress and inability for the doctors to figure things out as well as trying to support Sara who was full of fear and exhaustion.
Watching Sara die was HARD. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done – maybe tied with delivering George. Although there wasn’t much for me to do in terms of her health and her treatments, I was doing so much driving back and forth between the hospital and our house. I was coordinating with friends who wanted to visit, and providing status updates on Sara’s treatments to those closest to us. I was periodically posting updates on Facebook to keep our larger circle in the loop. On November 1st last year I posted two status updates on Facebook; one in the morning in which I let everyone know Sara was in the ICU, and one in the evening in which I let everyone know Sara had been transitioned to hospice and wouldn’t be with us much longer. I so wish she’d been able to hold on just a little bit longer, but it wasn’t possible, and she slipped away peacefully less than 24 hours after her main oncologist and I agreed to withdraw treatment.
Initially I was certain I would have to move out of our house, but once the initial shock of Sara’s death wore off, I decided that for now I’m happy to stay here. It holds so many of our memories – 3 of our 4 years together were in this house. I’ve made some changes since Sara died – replaced the upstairs carpet with nice vinyl plank flooring, bought some new furniture, switched around some of the rooms, started panting some of the walls… but it still feels like our home, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Sara was my person, the love of my life. She was like a magical unicorn that embodied exactly what I’d been looking for in a partner, and the fact that we met through OK Cupid was a bit of a miracle. Sara made my life better in a million ways – both big and small. I will forever be a better person for having had the opportunity to be her husband. I hate that cancer took her from me, from all of us. I hate that I only got 4 years with her. The world still feels wrong without her.
I don’t really know how to end this post. So, I’ll just say that I still miss Sara – as much if not more than I did when she died. I’m still grieving. I still cry regularly. Some days I feel like I’m barely functioning. I hope at some point in my future, my grief for Sara will shift so that it isn’t as active in the forefront of my world, giving me a little more emotional room for other things, but there is no one right timeline for grief, and I am determined to give myself permission to grieve how I need to grieve.
I don’t know if I’m going to sleep tonight. There’s only about 6 hours left until the exact anniversary of her death, and part of me wants to continue holding vigil. At this time last year I was snoozing on and off in an uncomfortable recliner next to Sara’s bed, just trying to be there with her. I’ll leave us with these pictures – the first being the first photo of the two of us that I can find Sara posted on Facebook from Nov 2015, and the other being the final photo taken of the two of us, on Nov 1st, 2019.
What a beautiful sharing. What a gift you were given in each other. What a tragedy that your time together was so brief. That you for your amazing sharings. I know you write them for YOU, but in the telling, they live.