GRIEF: A Love Story Memoir Begun

 

I don't usually share my writing works-in-progress, but since my husband's cancer and transition, I haven't felt much like creating. I'd supposed my ability to craft stories had died with him.

However, I have been keeping a file with notes, #Facebook posts, and memories with the intention of one day pulling those together and writing a memoir about #caregiving, #loss, and #startingover.

This week, I'm happy and grateful to say I've outlined the memoir and just yesterday, wrote the short prologue that will open the book.

The prologue is below. I wanted to share it with you because so many of you have been part of my journey over the last year and several months, but also because I believe sharing it is laying down a challenge to myself: write the damn thing.

Prologue

March 12, 2025

The house was very still. The two dogs, Kodi and Joaquin, slumbered. My sister-in-law had retreated to her room to try to sleep.

Bruce was gone. He'd passed, alone in my office, a few hours earlier. He waited to be alone to take his final breath. How I’d wanted to be there, holding his hand, as he made his way off this mortal coil.

But I was out, driving around, trying to calm my mind after a day that had taken its emotional toll. Many of Bruce’s family—sister Kimmie, father and step-mother, had all flown in because I’d told them they needed to come soon, sooner. Their son, their brother, was vanishing before my eyes.

“You need to come if you want to say goodbye.”

After I’d seen them off at the airport, I needed space. My heart was breaking, my breathing ragged. I was numb and in a state of shock. I didn’t, couldn’t, admit it to myself, but I think, deep down, knew this was the end.

Lori, Bruce’s other sister, was staying with me and, after the family left, she retreated into her room to watch TV.

This is the time my husband of twenty-three years took his last breath.

Alone.

On a hospital bed in the middle of my office, covered by a purple NYU blanket a friend and old college classmate had sent as a gift during his illness, Bruce died.

It’s hard to say that word. Died. Dead. We humans like to say ‘passed,’ or 'transitioned' or made his exit—something that will soften a blow that can never be softened.

Lori had come in to put lip balm on his dry lips. He had taken only morphine and tramadol the past four days. No food. No water.

The hospice nurse had visited earlier that day, a jovial and kind man whom I would never see again.

Lori discovered Bruce no longer breathed.

She called me and I came home immediately. “You should come back. I think Bruce passed.”

I looked at my husband on the hospital bed. Stared, numb, in shock. It wasn’t him. It was a shell.

Lori and I talked about him growing cold.

I took Kodi, his special dog, the one who’d bonded more to him than Joaquin (who was mine), and put him on the bed. Kodi sniffed his face and then moved down the bed. He lay down and put his head on Bruce’s leg.

He would stay there until the people from the crematorium came to collect him, having to be pulled gently away.

His daddy was gone.

I made calls. To hospice, who arranged for someone to come, late now, to certify Bruce’s death, to the crematorium I’d chosen, to collect his body.

We waited.

I remember the stillness of that night.

It seemed as though the whole world had gone silent.

The two young men who took Bruce away were deferential, soft-spoken. I know they’d been through this scene on a regular basis, yet at no time did I feel this was routine. Their condolences were heartfelt. They eyes searching, kind.

They asked if I wanted to be present as they prepared him for leaving.

I didn’t think I could bear it. “No, but please let me know when you’re ready to take him out to the van.”

Who knows how long it was until they called Lori and me back to the room, telling us they were ready? That time, in my mind, is a dark fog. I have no memory of what went on in my head as I waited.

And when we came out to the foyer, I’d prepared myself to see my beautiful husband in some black body bag, not-at-all ready for the shock and finality of it.

But no.

The gurney upon which he lay was covered in a beautiful gold brocade cloth. It was a surprise, a small kindness I'll never forget.

No one said a word as we moved silently out the front door and into the night. The transport van awaited, its back doors open, spilling light onto our quiet cul-de-sac.

It seemed like, and was, a funeral procession.

The men loaded him into the vehicle. Lori and I watched, neither speaking a word.

When the men closed the doors and got inside to drive off, I turned to Lori and took her in my arms. She was a tangible piece of him.

At last, we cried, a dark sky, blanketed with stars, looking down on us.

I felt as though we were the only people in the world.

We turned and went back inside, where a house set up for two awaited. A home—filled with memories of a couple, building a nest, a life together.

Now there was only me. How would I go on when the person who was for me those three essential human needs—home, family, love—was no longer there?