“We were not standing, hands clasped, weathering the storm together. He was living the storm and I was standing by, desperately, unsuccessfully, trying to bat away individual rain clouds to get to him.
Somehow, the universe had succeeded in pulling our hands apart.
...And the truth was, whether I was wife or caretaker was never as important as whether I meant the words I’d said to him all those months before: we were in this together, no matter what. ” – Elaine Roth
My last post, Everything tells a story: Amazon , is like me trying to “bat away individual rain clouds”. When I was packing up before we left Birmingham he told our daughters I was “busier than a one-armed paper hanger”. One of his old, favorite expressions. And I was. And I wonder, should I have slowed down? Should I have spent more time just sitting quietly with him? But, I felt I had to keep going. I had to get it done because he couldn’t. Then the girls came as reinforcements, yet I still plowed ahead. We had to go. We had to get to Jacksonville. There was no magic cure there, but there was hope. And a longing to be home.
We made it there. He struggled on for a month, wrapped in prayers. He sat quiet for hours, unable to do much more than let us poke him with needles and try all the protein concoctions we used to tempt him to eat. I don’t know if he was lost in his thoughts, in prayer, or just zoned out. I do know he never lost his gentleness or his need for me. I just hope I was there enough.
Not In This Soup Alone 