6 months ago yesterday - my wife was recuperating at the hospital from a pulmonary embolism. She was doing well. Everything was going to be fine, after all the mortality rate (for a pulmonary embolism) in a hospital setting is only about 3%.
6 months ago today - all hell broke loose. A team of 15 medical personnel worked frantically throughout the day to save her. They were kind enough to let me stay in the room and witness everything. At 3:15 PM I knew that we had lost her.
What was left of her body passed at 12:03 AM.
We were happily married for 27-1/2 years and best of friends for 37 years. Our marriage was full of fantastic adventures. I love you Cindy.
Here's one that I had mentioned previously.
My wife left me so many gifts with the letters that she wrote and saved as well as her articles. Here is an excerpt from one:
"After our long day in the car, we decided to look for accommodations in Pisa and our reference was torn pages from a Fodor?s travel guide. On the outskirts, when five lanes of traffic started to squeal around us in mass anarchy, we pulled over by a phone booth. After playing the public phone like loser slots in Vegas, we ran out of options: there was no hotel within our budget that came with a space to park the car, La Macchina, the machine. Pisa was too big so we went looking for a smaller town on the coast.
It was our honeymoon and we had left the last two weeks in our around the world adventure to find my extended family in Italy. My husband Mac really was the man of my dreams ? nightmares I teased him - lanky, red hair befitting his Irish heritage and skin that glowed in the dark. He had a wicked sense of humor and a rapier wit. He promised to cherish me and accepted my idiosyncrasies like no man had before. How could I resist?
After twenty minutes we had driven as many kilometers and still there was no pensione. There wasn?t much of anything except for silent mountains, a dark road and a few scattered, lit windows.
?Hey. The light?s fading. We?ve been driving for thirty minutes,? I exaggerated. ?I don?t want to drive these roads in pitch black. We should turn around, eat the cost, and stay at a hotel on the coast.?
?There has to be something, somewhere. Let?s drive a little more and if we don?t find anything we can turn around. The coast is so built up, a hotel will be easy to find,? Mac replied.
Unless we stayed more than one night, we never knew where we would sleep. We had rented a car for a month and felt we should explore places where there was no public transportation. Besides it was too difficult to find a place to park the car in major cities. Everyday had a bit of an edge and by late afternoon I would become uneasy if we hadn?t found a place to stay. Mac didn?t seem to mind but I felt like primordial man in search of fire and shelter hampered by limited intelligence and only the rudest of tools.
The road narrowed and the gentle turns transformed into switchbacks. The smell of coastal humidity was replaced by drier, cool mountain air. The car groaned.
?Hey. We?ll never be able to find a place to turn the car around and not go off of the road.? I worried aloud. Since I could read and speak different languages I felt like I was responsible to get us where we were going. I was the navigator and always the worrier. Mac was the driver. I never realized that those terms would sum our relationship."
