As I write this, tomorrow will mark three months since Chuck’s spirit left us for heaven. I have mulled over how to put his loss into words for quite a while. I probably still won’t get it right, because his loss is ever-evolving, I hope that this can give some insight.
Chuck was born, prematurely. He had multiple surgeries before the age of three. That didn’t stop him from being a four-year, four-sport letterman throughout his high school career, though. Whenever he would have his sports physical, doctors would always say, “He’s got some kind of murmmur. We’ll keep an eye on it.”
Fast forward to when he was thirty-four, married, with three children. He contracted strep and it settled in the fluid around his heart. In the middle of finding this medical problem, doctors found an aneurysm between the two upper chambers of his heart and a hole under that aneurysm (Remember? He’s got a murmur??) He had open heart surgery to repair that. It was around this time that I began to realize that my days with him were numbered. This led to a lifetime of problems with afib. He had multiple procedures to try and correct it, but nothing really seemed to do the trick. In 2015, he had a pacemaker/defibrillator implanted.
Before Chuck got sick this winter, he was in the best shape of his life. His weight was down, he was active. We were remodeling an 1873 limestone schoolhouse. Then he got sick. He just couldn’t shake it, like he had done in the past. Then his pacemaker started sending out an alarm. He called his cardiologist. They told him the lifespan of his pacemaker had run its course and it needed to be replaced, so that’s what we did. Never once did it occur to me that he wouldn’t rally. He always had before.
But that was not to be the case this time. His heart was simply too sick For the life of me, I still don’t understand how someone with such a huge heart couldn’t rally, but it was not to be.
How do I say good-bye to someone I’ve shared more than half my life with–the good, the bad, and the ugly? We share three beautiful children that I know he would be immensely proud of every single day of their lives, the chosen spouses of our children, again, who are amazing humans. And those grandchildren?? Those children would light up his face every time he was around them!
As for me? There’s just a big hole.I’ve lost my confidante and best friend. He was my biggest supporter, and while we may not have seen eye-to-eye on everything, he would still be there to listen. We had a comfortable life, working on the house and spending time with kids and grandkids. Now everything is in turmoil and I’m just trying to make sense of it and make choices that are right for me, in my new reality, and make him proud.
I know he’s watching down on all of us, holding his grandbabies that went before him, playing with the dogs that went before him, and sharing laughs with his family members.
