Letters to Michael: Getting Lucky?

My darling Michael, tomorrow we are moving from the Penthouse to the Outhouse, so to speak.  I can almost hear you making that sentence up yourself.   Even if we were going right back to Ninth Street our house would seem pedestrian after ten days living out everyone’s fantasy.  Who, but the rich and famous, has a pool with such perfect temperature water just one step from the living room?  What home have you lived in recently where you can nearly touch the ocean that appears to be within reach at the end of the pool?  And very few have the ocean penetrating every room including the master bathroom.   Yes, sadly we have been spoiled, and very lucky to have the use of this wonderful home.  But we will still move into a condo in town.  At least there is a pool there too.  However, all good things must come to an end I am learning. I am hoping that the new place is, at the very least, clean, quiet, and air conditioned-comfortable. Before being spoiled by Lori and Mark’s house that is all we ever needed.   

Last night was Cinco de Mayo.  We celebrated by having a delicious dinner created by Chandy and Page.  Then we spent the evening in the pool.  It was the fullest and closest moon of the year.  It began as a rosy pink orb, a three dimensional form so big that you would swear that you could almost reach out and touch it.  Failing that, with the right vehicle, you could believe that you would be there in seconds.   In the past, on the rare occasions when I was traveling without you, I would look at the moon and know that somewhere out there you were looking at the same one and you were waiting for my return.  Last night however, my first full moon without you in twenty-one years, that reality is no longer the case. 

As I pondered the moon, I wondered about you and what people call a soul.  Do we really have one?  If so where does it go when we die and why hasn’t yours visited me here yet?  What is all this talk about the dead watching over us?  Just wishful thinking I am beginning to believe.  If our long departed loved ones were really watching over us why is there so much hate in the world, so much pain, and heartache?  My mother for certain would never, and I mean never, let me hurt the way I do today!  I used to tell you that “something” pulled us together.   Something put us in the same spot at the same time so we could meet.  Why would that same “something” have you get sick and die early robbing me of the warmth of your skin, the comfort of your voice, the tenderness of your heart?  I just checked and my safety net is gone.

I am trying to learn from this situation.  I am trying to figure out what to do without you when all my plans included you in them.  I am taking the time to contemplate the bigger picture and what that future might look like.  I see the moon so clearly but the bigger picture is shrouded in a dense fog as thick as the rock wall that protects this house from the ocean.  I now see how silly I was to think that my plan to grow old with you was even a plan.  I can plan a meal, a party, and a trip but I can’t plan my future other than what happens this next minute.  Beyond taking the next step forward, I have to stop planning.  If I plan to go into the pool for instance, I might decide that the water is too cool and have a seat.  Page might decide she has a question and I’ll turn to discuss what is on her mind instead.  I figured we had a plan.  We’d travel for six months and then move into Page’s condo and the rest would unfold.  We returned together from the last trip we took.   Why not this one?

I took it for granted that I would get on that van at Lake Atitlan with you by my side.  I planned to sit next to you all the way to the hotel because I hadn’t done so that morning.  I planned to have you here with us (not your Ashes) in Huatulco and Buena Vista but that won’t happen either.  One second you were fine and asking me what I was going to buy and the next you were having a stroke and changing our plans, irrevocably, forever!  I am learning that I have no real control over the plans that really count; the life and death kind. 

I had no control or even any plan to meet you in Boulder, Colorado September 20, 1991 but I feel lucky that I did.  Why don’t I feel lucky now??  I know this is going to sound stupid but, if I try hard enough, I am trying to see your death as lucky too.  I know that sounds awful, so let me explain.  I am trying hard to reconcile myself to the fact that your heart problem led us both to this place.  I feel lucky that you were with me for six and a half extra years. You could have died of a heart attack in 2006, riding your bike on the strand before we realized four major veins in your heart were one clot away from killing you.  I follow that logic with, “We got lucky then, why not now?”  I have looked up congestive heart failure and cerebral hemorrhage, again and again trying to find a correlation between the two so I can better understand what caused the stroke.  I know there is a correlation but there isn’t much information that helps me understand what happened. 

Lately, I have even been studying the pathways of the brain so that I can better understand the deficits you might have had if the bleeding had stopped and I had taken you home. The biggest thing I am learning is that no matter what, had you survived the first 3 cm insult in your brain, you would have been forever altered and no amount of therapy could have fixed the damage that was done.  I realize that I would have brought home the body of a man I knew but the mind that I fell in love with would have been forever altered and changed.  I have taken care of stroke victims so I know what I say is a fact. But it still doesn’t help how I feel.

So as I work through this problem of loss I realize you wanted me to have the memories of you that I do today.  You wanted me to love the man I married, not the damaged man you could have been.  You hated that your heart betrayed you and slowed you down.  You hated that your joints stopped functioning and kept you from playing the games you loved.  You would have hated having a mind that was forgetful, speechless, and altered in anyway.   I am just working out this kind of luck in my mind.  Letting my heart know it is okay that you are gone is a tougher sell.   I know in my head that anything less than what you were on the morning of April 13^th would have been a challenge that both of us would learn to hate.  It will take time.  Time to let you go and time to be glad we were as lucky with our life together as any couple would wish to be.  We both had several near death experiences that reminded us to be grateful each day we had together.  But when you get lucky as often as we did I think you believe your luck will never run out and you are shocked when it finally does!