September 20, the date hangs over us. Nine Twenty, the day when we find out what our plans will be. Will we prepare for surgery and all that goes with it? If that is the case will it go well, or will I have tubes hanging out of me for months? We don’t know. The other way, new spots or spread, not operable, in which case maybe a new chemo recipe, radiation, who knows. Playing the odds to extend life a little bit longer.
It’s a shadow in the room. We see it sometimes in each others eyes. A couple of times we sort of joked about ‘if I was gone’ or ‘if she went before me’. The pall of my mortality stands in the house. We look through it, we look around it, we try not to look at it but it is there. A towering pillar between us dark and foreboding.
I look into those eyes and I see the same eyes I saw first in the shadows of a room full of people the spring of 1972. Smiling blue eyes, the love in them, the brightness in them and sometimes the sadness in them that I see now more often. The fear that she will be a widow. Something I did not want her to be. Something that is likely my fault if it happens.
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