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My Profile
She blinded him with whiteness - 2008-07-25
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11:04 p.m. - 2003-10-30
Some of you, quite rightly, asked where my husband has been. Why wasn’t he chaining me to the bed and force feeding me like some Jeb Bush wanna-be? What the hell has he been doing? Michael has been doing what he has done for many years now, assisting me with grace and humor and such phenomenal tact that sometimes I am awed when I think on it. On the few excursions I’ve made during this downward spiral, he has behaved like a solicitous suitor trying to impress. He races around the car, opens the door and offers a hand as any true gentleman would do for his lady. He walks with his arm around my waist, taking the occasional nibble on my ear like a bar mitzvah boy besotted with his first real girlfriend. He stays late into his work morning, claiming missing tools or phone calls needing to be made during business hours. All the while he is making Wolf’s lunch, supervising Wolf’s toilette, and “just happens” to stay late enough to be here to put Wolf on the bus. When I do finally wobble downstairs there is a cup of tea steeping on the stove. He points to his used cocoa cup and tells me he poured me one because he’d made himself some hot chocolate. At no time does he remind me that something is out of kilter with our lives. Mike is a Virgo. He’s REALLY a Virgo. Along with an obsession with cubbyholes and pigeon holes and clever little boxes with compartments in them, Virgos show love by doing. Mike is a man of deeds, not words. So smack dab in the middle of a busy spell my workaholic husband decides to take the day off. Get some pumpkins, maybe. See if he can hunt down that fitting for Dairybride’s buggardly imported Swiss washing machine. I was going to the salon? Cool. He’d drive me. Take me to lunch too, if I wanted. There was nothing he wanted to do more. He knows how active my guilt button is. How badly I feel when I take him away from his work or load him down with all the domestic stuff on top of a full work day. He knows how much I hate being “helped”. After 14 years it STILL galls me to be a crip. How dark and dangerous my thoughts go when I am constantly reminded of what I cannot do. So he glides and dips through my life as carefully as a naked man in a cactus patch. He moves thoughtfully, mindful of those sharp needles. My temper. My shame. And his own pain. It works for him too, this tactful navigation. He loves me. My pain is his pain. Why dwell on it? Far better to be my romantic chevalier than my nursemaid. He’s been here watching. Judging. He kisses me good-bye in the morning and silently assesses how bad it is with me that day. On the days when I am a pain crone he’ll call mid-afternoon. “Hey Sweetie. I have to go by NAPA after work. Cascarino’s is next door and I’ll bring home some chicken parm heros. So don’t cook, okay?” You see how he does this? No biggie. AND he does me the courtesy of pretending I might actually get out of this chair and whip up a meatloaf. So you see there really isn’t any reason to have a case of the ass with my “neglectful” husband. He agrees with me that a life lived in grief and constant dragging reminders of illness and future loss is no life at all. He doesn’t ignore my illness, but because of his great love has found a way of dealing with it that keeps the blue meanies away. It allows a plumber to be a romantic. That some loving diplomacy (and a bit of duplicity) enables us to be just normal folks. Sometimes nauseatingly honeymoon-ish, but okay. He can hold me up while I vomit along side the road and make jokes about how it was lucky I wasn’t wearing sandals. He makes me giggle by swearing I glow in the dark after yet another MRI with the radioactive isotopes. He pops wheelies with my wheelchair and races me along humming the Peter Gun theme in my ear. He lives under the heaviest burden there is, that of loving someone who isn’t going to get better, and he leads me through this bitter life dance with as much savoir faire as Fred Astaire. ~LA
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