Second Year Regrets

For me, the second year of widowhood was worse than the first. The shock that had enveloped me in the beginning of bereavement had begun to thaw. Relief that my husband's suffering was over had all but faded. Regrets flooded me, and I relived them over and over again. Two isolated incidents in particular nagged at me. Or I should say non-incidents. Why had I refused to go riding with him at the stables he had discovered near our house? And what made me say no to his suggestion of a hot air balloon ride over the Hudson Valley?

In the second year of widowhood, especially in the early morning hours, these two particular self-recriminatory details of the ways I had failed him played over and over in my mind. Unacknowledged were the days spent at chemo, in doctors' waiting rooms, by his bed in the hospital; pouring over research for therapies, encouraging statistics, and foods to tempt his waning appetite. Unappreciated was the exhaustion that became second nature to me as I continued to teach four college courses, chair meetings, and write the textbook I had contracted to finish before he fell ill. Unregarded were the bedside buckets, the salves and gauzes, the saniwipes, and the pill counts.

Time had collapsed in my memory. I racked my brain trying to remember when he had wanted to go horseback riding and hot-air ballooning. Was it before he got sick? Did I refuse his wish when our time together seemed as if it would go spinning on for many decades? Did I refuse during the time when I believed I had a right to say I don't feel like doing that today; when the understanding was maybe tomorrow or next year? Was it before he was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer when nothing would be the same again? It must have been. It had to have been before that. After, neither one of us had the strength or will for anything but fighting the enemy.

When I had the courage to stay with my regrets over what I did and didn't do with and for Al, I recognized that a much larger remorse lurked below the surface. My main regret, the motherlode from which veined out all of my smaller, more manageable self-recriminations, was that I hadn't saved him. That's the one that grew loud in my sleep, the one that I stifled as soon as I began to detect its insidious questions that begged no answers. Why hadn't the doctors detected the cancer earlier? Why had I let him go by himself for his routine physicals? Why hadn't I known when his symptoms changed from those of a healthy athletic man who pushed his body to extremes into the symptoms of a man incubating cancer in his lungs? Oh I knew I was regretting the impossible, but I regretted it all the same.

Still, in the sleepless early mornings of that second year (and, yes, sometimes even now), I wish I had said yes to every wish and whim he had ever expressed every moment of our lives together. I imagine us waking early on a crisp fall morning and mounting our horses, the pungence of leather and steed, the steady clopping of hooves on mountain paths. I see us dismounting at the end of the trail, laughing at our aching thighs and bowed legs, eager for a hearty lunch. Or I change the scene entirely and picture us together in a basket strung to a giant stripped balloon,  amazed at our luck, rising, rising together above the valleys, over the mountains, and into the clouds.