Chest-clenching/Death and the Television

Occasional chest-clenching waves of pain. Mostly associated with words coming out of my mouth (I'm not one who's previously tended to talk to myself out loud), mostly along the lines of "Jerry, please come back" or "Jerry, I can't do this." How can I do this? How can I live without him? How can I be in this world, in this house that is so much a beautiful reflection of his craft and talent as a cabinetmaker and designer and craftsman, surrounded by the yard he had such plans for, with the wildflowers up for the first time and the native grasses and plants spreading the way he hoped, and the buckthorn encroaching (his nemesis), how can I be in all the places we were together, how can I go forward without him? I don't want to. I want him to come back. I want him to be himself, his mostly-healthy, beautiful, loving, cynical, silly, kind, brilliant self. I want to see those twinkling blue eyes and the silly face he always made when I called him "Handsome husband" (before he shot back "Beautiful wife"). I want him to be here. I don't want him to be dead and I don't want to be a widow, I want to be Jerry's wife, the way I've been for ten years, the way I've been happy for ten years. I want our life back. I want my honey back.

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I fear I may be repeating the kinds of things I just wrote up there more and more often. Won't make for scintillating reading. But it's there.

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Now, Death and the Television. Or Death and the Movies, for that matter. Until now, I had never witnessed a death before. I had never witnessed the weeks leading up to a death. I had never seen the pure physical hell a human body can be subjected to, day after day after day. And now that I have, I realize that about death, as about so many other things, television lies. The movies lie. They show the person on her deathbed, calm, quiet, comfortable, perhaps with a glow of perspiration on her forehead. She's lucid when she's awake, and she has profound last words of wisdom to impart to the loved ones gathered around the bed. She recognizes everyone, her breathing stays normal to the end, she's stoic and accepting in the face of what's coming. And then she slips peacefully away, possibly even smiling, definitely looking beautiful and just as she did in life.

It's all a lie. I wish it wasn't. I wish I'd had the chance for profound final conversations with my honey, I wish he'd been comfortable and calm the whole time, I wish he'd been lucid and himself. I wish he hadn't slipped away over the course of weeks of pain. I wish he'd had a comfortable moment some time between last October and 13 June.

I wish he were here.