Secrets, Part Four

A continuation of parts one, two, and three.


Everything changed after K's first seizure, and looking back now I thought I had buried all my emotions and feelings about our troubled relationship while I took care of her, but I realize there were a few times they bubbled back up. I've never known a person could block out memories like I did when K got sick, and then months later, just as suddenly have them resurface. It's almost surreal to me, but then all of last year was like that; I was so focused on caring for K that I didn't pay much attention to anything else.

K and I had been invited by our neighbors to come to their church home group just three days before K's first seizure. Two weeks later, after her craniotomy, we went to the last two weekly meetings before they ended for summer. Everyone in the group was very nice and we enjoyed getting to know them, but the hardest thing for me to accept was the admiration they gave us for K's upbeat attitude toward her battle with cancer, and for me as the loving and devoted husband taking care of his wife. All through her illness people would mention what inspirational role models we were to them, and what a loving couple we must be, and I would cringe a little bit inside every time.

The hardest moments I personally had were when K, after she knew she was going to die, said to me "I don't understand, we were suppose to be the 50 year couple". She told me that two different times, and both times I had to look away because it would make me cry. I cried for her and for us, in the knowledge that we probably wouldn't have made it to 50 years in any case. It was the only time in her illness that I openly thought about my decision I had made earlier that year.

God, the emotions that come back as I write this, they're so hard to put down into words. I know that there is more to a marriage than just sex, but in my eyes it should be equal along with everything else in a relationship. I still loved my wife, but it wasn't the type of love we should have had! She said we were pals, I felt like we were just friends and I just couldn't live the rest of my life like that. I didn't hate her for the way she was, but I wanted more. I needed more.

Another blogger, Matt Kohia, wrote some thoughts about his marriage that struck a chord in me: ...I really need one of two things to occur: 1) (my wife) wakes up and starts treating me like a husband should be treated by his loving wife. 2) I grow some courage and file for divorce. I want #1 so badly I can almost taste it. I just don't see it happening anytime soon. I'm trying to hold out as long as I can. I don't know how long that will be.…she shies away from even simple shows of physical affection all too often for me- someone who lives and breathes on the stuff.

I told my hospice grief counselor I was afraid K would have been devastated if I asked for a divorce, and she said "do you really think she would have been?" I had never thought of it that way before. She was no doubt aware of what was lacking in our relationship. For a few years K tried placing the blame on me by saying if I just had more interest in sex, maybe something would happen. I would usually just ignore these comments, until one day when she said that in front of her mom, and I spat back to her "anytime you're ready Hon, I'm there. I've been ready. You name the place!" K never said anything ever again about me not wanting sex. I'm pretty sure had we divorced, she would have moved back home with her mom (something she had been bugging me to do anyway), and never married again. Who knows, the road not taken, let alone built.

I sometimes wonder if there was something else I could have done or said to help her and us, and sometimes I wondered if there was something wrong with me sexually. I know now a lot of those feelings came from having a wife that never responded much to the affection I gave her. Yesterday I received a copy of Tony Comstock's Matt and Khym: Better Than Ever, and as I watched them making love, I thought wow, Matt is doing the same things I used to do with K, but she never responded to me like Khym does to her husband's touch. It made me sad to watch it, thinking about what should have been, but never was for us.

It's hard to know if I really would have gone through with it. I don't think K would have changed. But we as humans tend to get too comfortable in our lives. I remember many times looking around my house, at our belongings, our family pictures, thinking about the life and memories that K and I had built and shared, and I wondered: can I start over? Do I want to start over? Do I give up after 29 years and begin again, not knowing if I'll even find what I’m really looking for? I kept thinking all these things over and over in my head early last year, before fate took the choice out of my hands.

The whole purpose of writing this has been to make it easier for me to tell my children, my family, and friends about it. And it has done that, but every time I’d tell someone, I would reach a point where I couldn’t explain how I felt about it all in relation to my wife’s death. Until a couple of days ago when I wrote it out.

Would I have left her?

I’ve come to realize that I’m relieved I never had to find out.

But I'll carry the guilt that statement makes with me for the rest of my life.