haunted

Each day brings a memory that takes me back a year. Approaching the one year anniversary of Donnie’s death has flooded me with those memories of where I was a year ago. And these are not the memories that I want to revisit. It has been a year since he went into the hospital. Donnie. He was in so much pain but didn’t want to g to the hospital. That is the only time I ever remember Donnie yelling at me. We never fought and he never raised his voice. He wanted me to go refill his pain prescription and I wanted to take him to the hospital. He yelled at me and told me to do what he asked me to do. I did. When I came back, he called me to his side and sobbed and told me how sorry he was. I told him that he had nothing to be sorry for. He had done nothing wrong. I knew it was the pain talking, not him. I asked him what he would do if it was me. He told me he would make me go to the hospital. I asked him what the difference was. He told me that he would go.


Looking back now, it’s painful. We had no way of knowing that when he checked into the hospital that day that he wouldn’t come home until it was with hospice. And even though I know it is in no way my fault, I feel terrible for making him go. I made him go check into that hospital and he didn’t come out until it was time for him to go home to die. I made him go. I made him go and they put him thru all of the tests and surgeries and the treatments and he didn’t even want to go to the hospital. He did all of that for me. He suffered thru all of that for those 7 weeks because of me. Because he knew I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to him yet. How do I live with that?

We were both thinking that they would get him fixed up and in a day or two he could go home. They kept telling us maybe in a day or two, then maybe next week. Then we got to the point that we didn’t even ask anymore. He was there for a month. And in that month, I watched that fucking cancer take him from me, one day at a time. I lost a little bit of him each day he was there

It is these memories that are haunting me. These are the memories that cloud my mind right now. They replay like a movie in my mind that I can’t turn off. I. The smallest thing will spark that memory and I hate it. Donnie’s life was so much more than it was those last 7 weeks. That is what I am need to be remembering.