THE GRAYING

I used to excitedly anticipate Fall & Winter – those were the months I really came alive. Now … not so much. Now, the Fall & Winter months hold nothing but hard memories to wade through and days on end where I am sleep-deprived.

Where there was once color in my life and ease of breathing – now there is only a foggy gray shroud & a hurting chest that makes breathing feel worse than environmental asthma complication; though environmental asthma and grief are pretty much the same: neither are not curable, you just learn to live with it and monitor the severity.

I have lost weight though over the past year though and that’s a good thing; but I wish I could have shed the excess baggage without the unravelling of 44 years. I am thankful Bob got to see me getting thinner and grayer – I shed 20 pounds in the 2 hospitals because I didn’t want to leave him for very long; so I ate small meals quickly & lived on juices which I kept in my duffel bag in his room: just enough food to fuel me and keep my body functioning without ending up in a bed beside him. Those stressful days in the hospital grayed my hair too, and that graying gave Bob & me something to laugh about – being a grandmother, I was anxious for my hair to start graying significantly … and Bob was waiting for my hair to gray too; he’d been gray for a while. So, when I bent my head over his hand one day to kiss it and he saw the top of my head was grayer than it had been, he smiled and said, “There’s getting to be more and more gray in your hair, honey.” And I smiled and said, “Yeah – and you’re the one putting it there this time.” We laughed; but it was laughter that was tinged with sadness. Yes, we both had been waiting for my hair to gray up, but it was sad that his impending death would be the catalyst to bring that into effect.

Bob started seriously slipping away from me in the Fall of 2018. And my hair started seriously graying up in the Fall of 2018. I lost the last remnant of my family the Fall of 2019. In a year’s time, my entire life has been seriously altered and reduced to a gray barren & tempest swept landscape.

I used to excitedly anticipate Fall & Winter.

Now; not so much.

Last year, today, I had made a gingerbread Bundt cake to slice and take back with me in pieces to the hospital – I had begun packing a lunch and eating it in Bob’s room while he slept. I had gone home while his medical team was running scams and doing exams: we were still being told they may send him home … I didn’t see that becoming a real reality, but ever hopeful, I had come home for a brief period of time and tried to revive a semblance of the Holiday Spirit ‘just in case’. I hung the wreaths on each door, changed out the welcome mats; and baked the gingerbread Bundt cake while I took a quick shower. I noticed, too, before I left for the hospital again, that my Christmas Cactuses were beginning to set buds.

Things were about to careen even further out of control … this day, last year, would be the last day there would be a reprieve in a life that was spiraling out of control.

And I am trying real hard, this year, to regroup and find the color in my life again.