I have mulled it over a thousand times in my head. I need to capture my story. My thoughts. My emotions. The 1,001 little vignettes and anecdotes that make up my crazy, fucked up life. I don't necessarily feel the need to immortalize my story as much I feel the need to share it in hopes that maybe it might help talk someone off their proverbial ledge.
I thought about starting with the story of how I met my husband, the love of my life. I thought about starting when things got bad and we lost our jobs and our house and had nothing to eat but potatoes for about a week (channeling my Irish roots.) I thought maybe a good place to start would be when we moved back to Chicago and we found work and a little apartment and started over. Then of course, there is the 800 pound gorilla of a story, how we got clobbered by brain cancer. God. Maybe I need to talk MYSELF off a ledge. Meh, I am not too worried. I live on the first floor.
I guess the most solid ground I can stand on is right where we are now. Familiar territory.
I am a wife to a man who does not remember me. He knows I am important to him, he knows I am familiar, but I don't believe he always knows why. I know this because he keeps asking me who I am and why am I here. This was not always the case. There was a time when we had a great marriage. When we had love, laughs, romance, the little private bits, all the things you romanticize and dream about. Now, not so much.
Once a week, at least, someone tells me, "Aw, honey. You are a saint." or "I really admire you." or even, "Wow. You took that whole better or for worse thing seriously." I appreciate the sentiment, and I know peoples' intentions are good when they say it. It even makes me feel a little good inside for a flash of an instant. Unfortunately, my reality can be almost too crushing at times to really be able to soak up the platitudes.
For the uninitiated, my husband has brain cancer. While we do not believe he has it now, at least per his neuro oncologist, we can't treat it anyway, as radiation would cause more brain damage. So there's THAT. Then there is the matter of him not remembering anything. That was due to the fact that in the discovery of this lime sized tumor on his brain and subsequent transport to another hospital for a craniotomy, he had a massive stroke and seizure that not only robbed him of his eyesight, but then completely wiped out his short and some long term memory. To give you a frame of reference, he remembers the band he played in in the 8th grade, but not our wedding. Nice.
So, needless to say, I am able to leverage quite a bit of emotion and empathy from people. I often joke that I serve merely as a cautionary tale to others. Sometimes that is true. But I really like think that I can show people the measure of pressure a person can take and still maintain and sense of humor, a sense of hope, a sense of resilience that no matter how bleak, it is possible to bloom where you are planted.
#braincancer
#TBI
