I saw this earring, one of Katy’s, out of the corner of my eye. It was in the room she occupied last, one of a set she wore all the time. She was wearing them the first night she slept in the hospice bed. I’m not sure how it ended up here, or how I missed it when I cleaned the room out. Yet here it is, staring me in the face and dragging all kinds of emotion to the front of the line.
Home hospice is a blessing and a curse.
Katy was only in hospice for maybe a month. Once the chemo drugs were out of her system and the cancer got its legs, time was short. So we made sure to take advantage of the time we had left.
Every night she could, we talked. She asked me questions she’d never asked before. We shared our stories: first kisses, most embarrassing moments, little anecdotes and tales from our past lives that, for whatever reason, we had never discussed. Certainty can do that. It makes you want to soak up as much as you can of your person. In those last few weeks, I became closer to Katy, and I can thank home hospice for that.
But, like I said, there’s a cursed side to this.
Not everyone’s home hospice experience will be the same, but I’m pretty sure of one thing: eventually you go from caring spouse to caretaker. I fed her. I bathed her. I shifted her position before bed. I did it all out of love, but with a driving necessity behind it that sucked the warmth out of it, because eventually it hits you: the person I loved so much that I did all of this for her was going to be dead at the end of it. It didn’t make me want to quit taking care of my wife, but it did piss me off that this was what I had to focus on in those last few weeks.
That anger still clings to me.
All this from an errant, inanimate object that caught my eye in the corner of a room.
Grief is a nasty thing that way. A small piece of paper can suddenly weigh a ton. A random scratch on the wall might open the emotional floodgates. Little, otherwise unimportant items can connect you to a moment that is either going to give you some peace or wreck you for all social activities for the foreseeable future.
So today, I picked up the earring and added it to the collection of items I’ve found around the house. Some I keep for a bit longer. Others have gone directly to the garbage.
I think I’ll keep the earring. I’ll add it to my earring collection.
It will be nice to carry her with me.
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