But I Didn't Miss the Dance
The time before...
I don't think about it much, usually. It really does not help in keeping a positive attitude.
This photo is the last one taken of me before Brian's symptoms entered our lives for real. We were coming home from CommonBonds Grand Gala, the annual fundraising event held each April. We did a hotel overnight at the Hilton.
It was a fabulous night. Perfect, in fact. That little limp, his leg complaint that night? Well, he had tripped on stairs in February and was not 100% after that. Brian always bounced back, but this was taking awhile. Still, he was not getting any younger and that could happen.
The first evening home from that great night was when he would show me that he could not lift his left foot up fully. Drop foot. But, but, but it's just an injury, right? Off to the Doctor he finally went, and so it began in earnest.
This is not a great picture of me, but looking at it I can see the difference. I remember that face. It never looks back at me in the mirror now. While I still have good times and I will no doubt have many many more, that face was different. It belongs to a woman who is married to the love of her life, a robust dude not young but with another 20 years in this world. Hell, he'd outlive old out of shape me, right? The dog in my lap is our first one, got her in July of 2010, just a few months after out April wedding. She had a big medical crisis back in February of 2011, a benign colon tumor. We spent a ridiculous amount of money on the situation, but here she is, healthy as all get out at age 12.
Healthy, like Brian always was. As I have generally been. When you are healthy, you believe that somehow, the Dr. will be providing reassurances. Whatever your concerns, they will turn out okay. The news has never been dreadful, so in your heart you believe it will not be dreadful until you reach some ancient age. Then, one day it just is dreadful. That diagnosis everyone said it just cannot be come to pass.
It will never be okay that we got hit with this. Platitudes about how "we all die somehow" are said sometimes by people who have never been hit like this, never heard "there is nothing we can do". The "how" in the somehow matters - a lot.
Even while Brian does really well for what he has, we lose little things by small pieces all the time. Mostly, we lost those a lot of those years we thought we would have. I lost the woman in that picture.
You may notice how I speak as though I am Brian. That's not the case of course, but I believe of all the crazy things it was in his diagnosis that I finally felt what a profound love was, a connection so intense that we shared that diagnosis. My body does not share it, my soul does. Yet I know, I am lucky to have that kind of love, lucky to experience it because I know many never do. It's been there with us since the start, but an illness like this makes you see it in sharp relief.
So, I need to sit with that, realize I am lucky. As the song goes, I could have missed the pain but then I would have missed the dance. The dance is so very worth experiencing. Brian is the best thing that ever happened to me, nothing will change that.
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