Denial

 I was never going to be able to influence my husband to do things the way I felt was right. He was always going to attend to his health in his own particular way which is how he approached all the aspects of his life. There was a degree of suspicion about the traditional medical profession that did not always serve him and probably stems from the fact that his mother, all those years ago, died young.

Against medical advice, he did not do surgery, but rather approached an integrative doctor, meditated, juiced. All was fine until it wasn't, and even then, testing was slow and misdiagnosed, until a biopsy determined that the cancer had spread to his bones.

Denial protects, unfortunately, from facing the facts before you, and there was no bucket list, no readjustment of life to incorporate the bad news, just more supplements and various powders and pills, which were never going to do the job.

I fought and raged at times against the process, tried to persuade and convince, but at the end of the day, he was going to do it his way, make his choices, and that was that.

It was only a couple of weeks before his stroke when I found that I had stumbled upon a new landscape, one where I had come to terms with the way things were. It is called 'radical acceptance'. Still, the stroke took me by surprise and with hindsight I wish that I had been more assertive. At the same time,  I was missing parts of the story that would have enabled me to be more assertive. It was a slow moving trainwreck and one over which I had little control.

It is up to me, and my amazing children, to navigate and sort the next chapter. We support him in every way we can, and we await denial letting go of its grip so that this final chapter can be one of peace for him and for us, that we can make the best plans possible, find purpose, and rest in love.