LETTING GO

We still get the weekend Toronto Star. Our kids sometimes wonder at our anachronistic ways.

I think I absorb more than enough hard news during the week so on the weekend, I look to the paper for commentaries as well as heart warming stories.

Here's one from the Sunday editorial page that touched my heart.

Page after page overflowing with frustration...the medical system...the pandemic...the ineptitude...the disease itself.

Endocrinology, Oncology, Gastroenterology, Radiology, Pharmacology.

So many clambering to help...stumbling clumsily over each other...social workers, dieticians, nurse-practitioners, physicians, nurses, LPN's, physiotherapists, phlebotomists, palliative specialists, wound specialists, and the most confusing of them all ..home care. We lost track of them. They lost track of us.

Try to be understanding. It's a system beleaguered...strained...on the verge of collapse...could WE get a little understanding here?

Careless words, thoughtless words...Words sting. They leave marks.

Cancer...metastatic...advanced...palliative...

It's never easy. The diagnosis.

It couldn't have been more difficult. 

In spite of everyone's "best'" efforts. 

He suffered. He endured. He died.

Peacefully ( after the torment). Mercifully....quietly...

Twelve pages I filled.

I had to let it out.

I had to let it go.

I read my words aloud. Words that until then had been private...personal...excruciatingly painful...

My rabbi listened. 

We sat quietly in my backyard bunkie. I read. I wept a little.

My rabbi listened and encouraged.

She said some words I cannot remember. All I know is that they were kind and they comforted me.

I lit a fire in my chiminea. I placed my words in the fire. 

I had to let it out.

I had to let it go. 

\What came next was unbearably sweet and righteous.

I placed the ashes of my beloved in a hollow I had dug in the garden...the beautiful place we had shared our lives....I planted an evergreen. Beside his little tree, I placed a brick I had painted black. On the brick, painted in white was a musical staff with the quarter note G.

His life was music. We were together for a quarter century.

His first initial was G.

My rabbi spoke incredibly, achingly beautiful words.

She helped me say my last "Godspeed."

by June Mantle on the passing of her husband Gary on November 17. 2021.