The half way mark starts N.O.W!
And a HUGE UGH!!!!!!
Sixth months ago today was Christmas Eve. I was working from home because Gary wasn’t feeling so great plus it was a short day at work anyways so it all worked out. We had been invited by our good friend Melanie and Abel to spend Christmas Eve with their family once again, just like we had for the two previous years. All day long I kept asking Gary if he felt up to going because it was his call to make. Ultimately he decided that we would go and try to make the best of it. Gary had a BLAST at the party. Even though he wasn’t feeling 100% he felt well enough to play RockBand. I was watching most of the time while he jammed on the drums and at one point someone was getting tired of playing guitar so he asked me if I wanted to play. That was the last time we played a video game together. UGH!
I remember having to drag Gary out of their house because he was having so much fun socializing. Once we got to the car I could see how tired he really was. He pushed himself too much. We got home and he was so beat that he couldn’t help me bring Mikey’s gifts from the garage to place under the tree, ya know since Santa was coming to our house.
Six months ago today, Gary put Mikey to bed for the last time in his life. Had I known that I would have cherished that moment so much then, but I didn’t know. He loved that little boy so very much.
Half a year since my happy family was happy and together and happy because we were together. It feels like it was just yesterday.
Day 5 of 21
Years ago I heard the saying that it takes 21 days to build a habit. The habit I’m trying to rebuild is getting myself back to the gym. I haven’t been a gym goer since before Mikey was born. Shoot actually it was before I got pregnant really. Dealing with Mikey’s torticollis and then Gary’s real cancer diagnosis well makes sense that I’ve put MY health on the back burner, until now. A few months ago I bought a jogging stroller in hopes of avoiding going back to the gym. Figured since I wanted to train for a half marathon it was the wisest purchase. Well it was great up until the rainy season kicked in down here. Nothing sucks more than getting home from work hoping to go on your hour walk/jog and you can’t because its raining out.
Because of that I decided to rejoin the gym. I was reluctant at first because after Mikey was about a year old Gary and I tried going back to the gym and we even enrolled Mikey in their Kids Klub (yes they spell club with a “K”). But he totally freaked out there because of all of the older kids running and screaming around. So I signed us up for a month to month membership that way I could try it out for him. Low and behold he LOVES the Kids Klub. Which is great because I can get a good hour’s worth of a workout in.
So I’ve been at it for 5 official days. Been going 4x a week. I plan on counting the 21 days based on actual days that I can get myself to the gym, not calendar days, that would be cheating myself. I HAVE to do this not only for myself but for Mikey. I owe it to him. I’m his only parent now and he needs me to be around to see him grow up and have kids of his own. That means making sure I take care of myself so that I can do that for him.
Dreams of daddy
I don’t know how we got on the topic of daddy while on our way to the gym today but from the backseat of my car I start hearing Mikey talking about daddy. Specifically how he wants to find him. Ouch, talk for a stab in the heart!!!!
For the past 5.5 months I’ve been telling him that his daddy is in heaven with the moon and the stars and he’ll forever be in his heart. Mikey apparently is a smart little boy and realizes that its possible to go up to the moon and stars if you had a rocket ship. So he insisted on going in a rocket ship to go to daddy so that he could play with him. Because he REALLY wanted to play with his daddy. So to try to calm his whining I decided to ask him if he played with daddy in his dreams and he of course said yes. I doubt Mikey knows what dreams are, but its was comforting to think that he was playing with Gary in his dreams. I then proceeded to ask him what he did with daddy. Go figure, he remembers playing guitar hero with Gary so that was one of the first things he mentioned. He said that he played guitar and also the drums. 
He also mentioned playing with the bouncy ball. So I asked if he played soccer and basketball with him and he enthusiastically said yes.
I can only hope that this little boy *is* having dreams of his daddy. I’m doing my best to try to preserve whatever memories he could have of his daddy. It won’t be easy since he’s so young and the odds are against me from the get go, but I can only hope that our angel upstairs is doing his hardest to help me out in that department.
This month can now end
I’ve made it 20 days into June and I’m done with the month. Today just tops it off with it being Father’s Day. I did surprisingly well most of the day. Yesterday we planted a beautiful crape myrtle tree with white flowers in the back yard in memory of Gary for Father’s Day. This morning I took Mikey to see the new Toy Story 3 movie. For those people that didn’t know Gary he was a HUGE Pixar fan. HUGE is an understatement really. He had friends that worked at Pixar and envied them because they were doing something he just dreamed of doing. So it was kind of ironic that of all weekend for this new Pixar movie to come out it had to be this weekend. It’s almost like Gary was showing me a sign or something.
So we went, and we enjoyed the movie. Went home and I had an art project for us. I wanted to do a stepping stone that will be placed in front of our new tree. So Mikey and I worked on that, it’ll take 2 days to completely dry up so I won’t be able to take pics of it just yet, would rather post pictures of the final product 
As the day went on it started to hit me. I guess keeping myself busy had kept me from absorbing the fact that today is Father’s Day. It would have been the first one that Gary would have heard Mikey say the words Happy Father’s Day. I’m sad for my son more than myself. For the rest of his life he will not have a father to wish a Happy Father’s Day to. He got robbed from enjoying buying his daddy all of the tacky Father’s Day gifts and doing all of those daddy and me events. So on this Father’s Day I am sad for my son because he doesn’t realize it right now but he had the best father in the world and now he’s gone and there is nothing I can do to fix that. 
P.S. Doesn’t help that I had the Disney Channel on and of all nights they picked TONIGHT to air Pixar Short films. Gary always found these to be hilarious. Ironic? Some weird coincidence? Or someone from above slightly interfering here??
Life-or-Death
Yesterday while browsing cnn.com like I usually do for my news fix I came across an article with the title Who will make your life-or-death decision?. I apparently was interested enough to read it. Low and behold it went on to talk about living wills, but not just that. It went on to talk about how it really is important to make sure that those loved ones around you really know what your final wishes are. It immediately reminded me of the fact that Gary and I had talked about his final wishes LONG before his cancer diagnosis.
I knew that Gary wanted to be hooked up to a machine for as long as possible. He insisted that he’d come out of any coma he was in so he wanted to stay hooked up. He also adamantly told me many times how he wanted to be cremated and be inside of the house. I never thought knowing these two things would ever be so important THIS early in our marriage.
I’ll admit when he was in the hospital for the last week of his life it was extremely weird to make all of his medical decisions myself. For the first time in my life I was making a life-or-death decision for another human being, one that I loved so very much. I only hoped that every decision I made was the right one, and thinking back I did everything that Gary would have wanted me to do. I know that. Ultimately I never had to be faced with that decision of disconnecting him from a machine because he made that decision for me.
After his death I realized how important it was to have MY wishes in writing because the one person that knew what I wanted done was no longer around to do the same for me like I did for him. I immediately took care of my living will, my power of attorney (also another VERY VERY important piece of paper that would have made my life 1000x easier), my actual will, and paperwork for Mikey’s guardian god forbid something were to happen to me. Even though I have a living will I still find it very important to make sure that my loved ones know my wishes because in the end I won’t be around to tell them what I want done and I’ll count on them to make the right decisions.
Walk with us!
We are less than 5 months away from this year’s Light the Night walk. This year is the second year that Team Gary’s Guardian Angel’s will be walking. Unfortunately this year we are walking in memory of Gary and Mikey and I will be carrying the lit up gold balloon that symbolizes those that we lost leukemia and lymphoma. There are a few things that makes this year’s walk THAT much more special in my book.
#1 -Gary is one of this year’s Honored Heroes. What an honor for our family, he’d never expect something like that in a million years.
#2 – At last year’s walk one of Gary’s coworkers, Gretchen, who raised over $1k in a matter of a week got a medal for having raised so much money. Well I happened to be standing right next to Gary with the camera turned on just as she was giving her medal to him because he was such an inspiration to her. That night I told Gary that next year (now this year) I will be up on stage getting my medal too because I will raise over $1k just myself. I WILL!!!!
So here I am soliciting people to walk with us at this year’s event. It’ll be on November 13th, at Huzienga Park in Ft. Lauderdale.
If you’d like to join our team you can by clicking HERE.
If you can’t join us for whatever reason but would like to help me get to my $1k goal you can do so by navigating to my personal page or by clicking HERE
Thank you! With your help we can get the money that researchers need to come up with a cure for blood cancers so that no other families have to be broken apart like mine has been.
An anniversary I’d rather forget
It’s hard to just forget anniversary to important events, today is one that I’d honestly wish I could forget. Today is the anniversary of the day Gary officially started chemo for the very first time. I remember that day like it was just yesterday. I remember the emotions that I felt that day. I remember crying in private so that Gary coudln’t see how very scared I was. I wish so much that I could travel back in time and tell Gary to not do it. To just take his chance with this lymphoma diagnosis. But I know even if I went back in time he probably wouldn’t have listened. Gary was a medical geek that wanted so much to have been a doctor, he knew the right thing to do was to do the treatment even with the risks that it entailed. I know that it was the right thing to do becaus otherwise you live every day of your life wondering “What If”. And Gary didn’t want that. Now I live my life wondering “What If” every day. What if he didn’t do chemo, how long could he have lived?
As good as I have been the past couple of months I’ve hit a new low. It’s almost like my mind and heart have both started talking to one another and they both have come to the conclusion that Gary is never coming back. He’s gone. He can’t breathe, he can’t open his beautiful green eyes to look at me. I’ll never see him smile again. I’ll never get to give him another dose of the hug therapy he insisted on daily during chemo. He’s gone for good. I’ve been crying daily for the past week. None of my family members or my friends really know that I’m doing that, shoot Mikey doesn’t even know because when I cry around him its in the car with my sunglasses on.I don’t know if I’m finally really allowing myself to really grieve or what, but this just feels so very raw.
I wish someone would pinch me so I could wake up from this bad dream already!
My life…..the children’s book
With today being the anniversary of the day that Gary and I hopped on a plane to Maryland for his very first round of chemo I was reminded about how crappy my life has turned in just this past year. If anyone is due a break its ME! So everyone else…..quit your bitching, it’s my turn!!!!!! When I was thinking about all of the crappy stuff that was thrown our way I was reminded of one of Mikey’s favorite books that we seem to read EVERY SINGLE NIGHT.
The book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day could seriously summarize my life right now. Except for the minor fact that I’m not in grade school complaining about how my day got off on a horrible start all because I fell asleep with gum in my mouth. So you are probably wondering where the hell I’m going with this. Well in the book Alexander constantly vents about how this or that goes wrong and how he vents about it to whomever is nearby him but no one bothers to listen. That’s kinda where I feel a lot like Alexander.
There are some days when I feel like everyone thinks things are just hunky dory with me. That there is no possible way I could, gosh still be grieving. But it’s day’s like today where all of the progress that you’ve made, you take a thousand steps back all because of what TODAY signifies. So *NO* things aren’t all peachy for me. I don’t bitch about it like Alexander does because quite frankly I think everyone is tired of hearing me bitch, so no one is there to listen anymore. That’s why I blog about it, because if anything I can get my words out, whether or not anyone chooses to read what I have to say.
Edited to say……OOPS as I was continuing my book writing this evening I realized that I was a little ahead of myself on this anniversary crap. That’s actually tomorrow. Woops. Well guess I have another crappy day in store for me then!
Bring on the tissues
As I said in my previous post I’m working on my book and I don’t really get that far without coming across something that makes me tear up. This was the latest one and I just had to repost it on my blog because when I read it I can totally hear Gary’s voice in my head saying it to me:
In our family I guess it’s best that I got the cancer since my son is so young he can’t comprehend and my wife is strong. However, if my wife got cancer I don’t know how strong I’d be if I had to explain to our son why mommy was sick AND do all the thing my wife is selflessly doing for me. If my Son got cancer I *know* I would not be strong enough to hold my wife up and take care of him. That idea literally scares me to the point of nausea.
Starting my book :)
Tonight I decided to sit here with my laptop doing the first step of my very own book idea. That is to go through Gary’s blog posts and take what I can for the book. I fully expected it to not be an easy venture. Not because its soooooo very hard to copy and paste text from a website into Microsoft Word. It’s totally because I’d find myself reading the actual posts. Going back a year and reading things from the beginning of the NIH-journey, and knowing how the story ends, well I don’t have to tell you that I need a tissue box near me.
I came across this paragraph in one of Gary’s posts that he wrote 11 days after his official diagnosis of Peripheral T-Cell Lymphoma, and immediately I found myself crying.
2. PAIN and GUILT:
So after the shock of it all began to wear off I began to feel a tremendous amount of both pain and guilt. Not for myself. I mean let’s be honest if I die, I’m not really going to suffer for it. No, I feel an unbelievable amount of both pain and guilt for my wife and son. My wife because if I don’t make it she will be left holding the pieces of a shatter life and will be forced to move on. I hate that idea. And for my son I feel a sense of devastation because as a child I did not have a father (since that cocksucker left when I was 2). I vowed that when I had kids I would never do that to them. Now, I may be forced into doing that and I hate myself for it. All around feeling of guilt.
So with that I’ll continue with my work for the night with my tissue box by my side.
A recent widow and single mom doing my best to survive on my own.
Last year I told Gary that I'd raise $1k at the 2010 walk, please help me reach my goal. This year Gary is one of the Honored Heroes for the walk so its even extra special to me. :) Just click on the Sponsor Me image to be taken to my fundraising page. Thank you!!!
Help me get to my 1st Half Marathon in Walt Disney World where I will run in memory of Gary :)
