Grief and Gratitude

On September 18th, I said goodbye to my beloved husband, Patrick.

He had been terminally ill for as long as I had known him; he was diagnosed with liver failure shortly before we became friends. Our story was a commonplace twenty-first-century romance: We became acquaintances and, later, friends on Twitter. Our friendship was a wonderful and strange thing. I didn’t know what exactly to call it. For several years we were confidants and cheerleaders for each other, a friendship, sure, but it felt like much more. Looking back, we were in love, but neither of us was willing to broach the topic, as we were both divorced and wounded from our pasts.

By the time we finally admitted our love for each other, his situation had become dire. He had a difficult time walking, and had been dealing with liver failure for a few years. “How brave for you to love a dying man,” people have told me since his death, but it wasn’t brave. It was necessary. I couldn’t not love his brilliance, his humor, his romantic nature, and his fierce embrace of out-of-the-ordinary things. I simply loved him. I had to love him.

There’s a certain amount of denial that happens when you’re in a relationship with someone who is terminally ill. Believing you’re doing all the right things, following the correct diet checklists, resting, seeing doctors – that all means he’s going to live, right? The liver regenerates…so he’ll be okay. How could he not be? We’re in love. Love will save him. I’ll take care of him. But I couldn’t. Our love didn’t save him. Sitting at his side—my partner, my true love, my champion—and watching his last breath was surreal. It was shocking. Even though I had been sitting there for three days straight, seeing that end made me freeze. The shock stayed with me for weeks upon weeks.

The shock masked a lot of other emotions that come with grief. I cried, of course, but it wasn’t until November that I really felt the despair from his loss. I’m no stranger to despair, being diagnosed at an early age with bipolar disorder. But this was a different level altogether—it was despair after finding myself, finding hope, finding inner peace. I truly didn’t know how to go on after I had found the One. I found myself with no hope. And that frightened me. How could I believe he was in a better place? How could I believe anything would be good again? In 2017, I was hospitalized for depression. I was nearly without hope then—but a smidge stayed with me. I had agreed to the hospitalization, a reflection of a small, desperate hope that it would help me. It was at that time that my friendship with Patrick blossomed from a shared camaraderie over our pains into an embrace of life. I really did improve, then and in the following years, into someone better. Without his encouraging me, getting into my heart and staying there, would I have changed for the better? I honestly don’t know. Sobriety followed three years later, once again instigated in part by him. Watching that painful deterioration in him caused by alcohol, I couldn’t hide anymore the fact that I had been for years upon years attempting to bury my emotions, failures, and fears in alcohol. And now I was watching it destroy the body of the man I loved. I gave up drinking and haven’t looked back. Patrick truly helped me be that cliché, my best self. But now I felt on the edge of a precipice. Was that new, better me even possible without him? Or was it an extension of him that I would now lose as well?

A few weeks ago, I was dreading my family’s Thanksgiving. I couldn’t bring myself to be around happy faces, laughing, sharing. I was lost. I walked our dog alone each day as the sun rose, always thinking of him.

A few days before Thanksgiving the realization came over me that Patrick wanted me to be strong, and that is what I had to do. I sat, watching the sun rise over a world that now felt alien to me without him. Sat next to our beloved Martha with her deep and soulful eyes and knew deep down that he wouldn’t have wanted me to cry alone on the holiday, which had been my admittedly ill-considered plan. Family had become so important to him over the past few years, as it tends to do when one is facing a life-or-death hardship, that I knew he wouldn’t want me to hide. I had decided immediately after his death that I had to keep him close to me, and that meant I would have to find the strength he always knew I had to face things I didn’t want to. I’d swear I couldn’t, and he’d insist I could, and dammit, he was right. I could. And I did. I spent Thanksgiving—and then Christmas—in the company of my family, forced almost against my will to love and be loved. And it was marvelous. Dammit, Patrick, right again.

I cry nearly every day for my love, gone where I cannot see, and try to muster hope that we will meet again when it is my time to go. But until that day, I thank him for making me see my own strength. I thank him for helping me find my true self and thank him for the immense love we shared in a time as gloriously happy as it was painfully short.

Thank you, my Patrick. Always.