It is so easy to love each other most of the time. We have a calm home, a similar sense of humor and a large group of friends and family to keep us smiling. It is also easy to grow restless. To question what we have. To realize our family of two is so small and oh so fragile and that there is nothing but our loyalty and love keeping us together. Yet we choose to keep on this path together. Sharing ups and downs, but more often than not sharing the happy, simple life we have built.
Then the fates change quickly and I am laying in an E.R. hearing words like pulmonary embolism and obstructed airways being thrown. Feeling like a specimen or subject matter not a human being scared and struggling to breathe. But, there is you. Your hand clasped in mine. Your eyes silently telling me “it will all be okay”.
You stay there ~never leaving for more than an hour or so. Making sure I eat and drink. You keep me calm, through every needle stuck in my skin and every procedure done too quickly and without much explanation. Not leaving any time open for doubt and fear to creep in and hinder me from getting well.
Our friends and family rally to call and visit. Brush my hair and bring me flowers. But, they all leave. Go back to their homes and families. Not you. Never you. You sleep on a makeshift hospital bed. You wake up every time I stir. Make me laugh at silly jokes and reassure me though my lifestyle forever changed by this series of events, will go on.
Then there is me. I watch you through a haze of tubes and medicine, and worry about you. Worry about your back and sleeping on that makeshift hospital bed. Worry about the exhaustion etched into your face. Urging you to take a day to yourself or at least go home and sleep. Although I am scared to be alone, I am more worried about you. I feel sad, because you feel sad. But you will not leave me. Rather, I go through testing and pain, not as a single entity, but as one half of a pair.
I think of our happier times like our wedding and numerous vacations. I always thought that I could never love you like I did then. How wrong I was. That last night in the hospital when my one of my stressed veins collapsed and there was blood squirting everywhere. Most of the blood was on you. Because, without hesitating, each time the vein burst you clasped your hands around my arm and stopped the blood. How I couldn’t sleep that night for fear it would happen again and I would bleed out. Every single time my eyes snapped open. There you were. Watching over me. In those moments I experienced a love that I did not even know existed outside of parental love. An unconditional love that I will spend the rest of my days trying happily to return.
When I am finally released and able to go home, you are still beside me. Never critical of the tears I can’t seem to stop whether they are of the happy or fearful variety. My best friend and parents shepherd me home as well, but they aren’t there late at night. Because it is at night, that I am too scared to sleep. Entrenched in a fear that my oxygen supply will dip again or another vein will collapse. It is you again. Rubbing my forehead and promising that nothing will happen to me under your watch. Looking at me like I am the most beautiful woman on earth, not like the bruised and greasy shadow of a person that I know I look like.
I can never thank you enough for your love. I can never thank God enough for bring us together. What I can do is love you with my whole heart and continue to forage into this world together. Our relationship may be calm and easy, but life is not. And we are strong enough to get through it all together.
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