A New Twist

Here is a new twist on the past.

I am dumping old emails from my work email account. We are getting ready to move to a new buuilding, with all new equipment, and we were told to do this.

As I read through the old emails from a year ago, I am horrified to discover that this is a countdown to Maris's death.

2009 was a bad year for me as well as for Maris. I am reading old correspondence pertaining to the Glenview Veterans Oral History Project, and it is bringing back all the misery I went through with that. That misery is co-mingling with the misery I now feel knowing that a year ago, Maris only had 4 more months to live.

If only I had known.....of course ,this has been the mantra all along.

When people are dying of a terminal illness, even if they are in misery, they (and their loved ones) can still make some plans for how to spend their remaining time.

It causes me endless misery that Maris may have been carrying out plans he had made for his remaining time. We will never know. The things he did that summer might have been things he had been planning for a long time as ways he wanted to spend his final time. When I talked to him about all the things he still wanted to do, I thought we were talking about what he wanted to do before leaving Hawaii...not before leaving this world.

Perhaps Maris had the foresight to plan. But i was too blind, and had no foresight. I thought we still had years remaining to us. I had no idea my son was dying of a terminal disease called suicide.

If I had realized he had this illness, I would have taken a medical leave of absence and done with him all the really important things that I needed to do with him, and that I thought we would do when he came home.

But that was not part of his plan for himself.

This is one of those mistakes from which I will never recover.