“When somebody love you, it’s no good unless she loves you….. all the way…..”
It is late at night as I sit here at the desk while you sleep. I am surrounded by photos of us. Happy photos that I look at now, knowing that in every one you had cancer and it was getting worse all the time.
I watch you carefully now. I wince at the almost constant pain that you have been in from the hemorrhoids that are slowly going away. I chauffeur you around and let you use me as a human crutch when you walk as your energy is so depleted from first the cancer and then the anemia from bleeding hemorrhoids and finally from the chronic diarrhea that has lasted for over 4 months. And I occasionally see you giving up.
It is easy to understand why people finally want to slip away. They are just tired of fighting the fight. They get worn down and just give up. I won’t let you give up. Do you hear me Lennie Schneider? You didn’t come into my life and make me fall in love with you, only to leave me. What would I have left, other than my memories of a Fairy Tale romance that doesn’t come around too often. You have been the best time of my life and I’m not ready to see it come to an end yet. How I have grown in the past 2 1/2 years. You said that the perfect first date would be a conversation that never ended; and that is exactly what we have. Sometimes that conversation may be a little one-sided or may get a little too loud, but we never run out of things to talk about. I don’t always see your point of view and I know that you don’t always see mine, especially when I am making you drink the concoctions that I believe will help heal you, no matter how yucky they taste. Or when you choose some food item in a store and I make you take it back like a naughty child. And you are at times child-like to me. I love the way you find fun in ordinary things. And I want to protect you the way I would protect my child.
I know that the past month has been hard on you. You have hardly even been outside. I keep telling you that we will look back on this past year or so as just an awful time in our life. And we will look back on it. I feel really good about Master Lee, the Chinese practitioner/Shaolin Monk that we found through a friend. There is a new life-energy that I see in you the past couple of days, and although it is minimal, you said that you are feeling a little better.
None of us ever knows what life has in store for us. We just go along, doing our best and hope that fate will be kind to us, especially with our health. I do not think of this as your cancer, but as something that we share; an ordeal that we are facing together. This has truly been a test of our love. So, don’t be scared Sweetheart. I am right beside you….. all the way.
I love you Lennie Schneider.
Kathryn