Waiting

Feels like I'm sitting on a powder keg, watching a lit fuse slowly burn closer and close to my perch. I'm not tethered to the keg, more like immobilized. There is nowhere to go, no way to escape.

Anxiety builds in my chest, making it tight. I frighten myself with feelings of left chest pain, tendrils of dull to sharp aches moving up and down my arm. Then I take my Chinese anti-anxiety pills or my Rescue Remedy and settle again, trying to ignore the flame moving closer to explode the reality of what has been my life as a wife.

Looking at whatever is around me helps. Daytime helps, unless I become overwhelmed with my need to control. I pester my husband, “How do you feel? Do you need oxygen? Or Morphine? Or what do you think we will need to do toward the end? Or what do you want to eat? Or how do you think you are going to feel when the accumulation of fluid around your heart squeezes it to death?”

He looks at me, shaking his head, and a grin spreads underneath his beard. “I don't know. I've never done this before.” We laugh. I settle again.

Nights are hardest because the darkness makes my worries more apparent. I startled awake one night and heard no breathing next to me. Patting his warm back reassured me, but I wanted to know his pulse so I scooted out of my side of the bed to his and searched for his wrist. His deep voice resonated from the pillows, “I'm breathing. Go back to sleep.”

So I returned to my side of the bed and counted his respirations as if they were sheep jumping a fence and finally drifted away, for a time, from the shortening fuse of his life.