A tribute to Two Women who Shared their lives with me

It is now late September, but this is not the usual installment in my travel log.  This is a difficult time and one that will take an many months or years to overcome.  If your looking for some interesting or not even half funny points or comments about a recent or existing trip, that will have to wait for another time.  This is just an installment to perhaps allow me to grieve and heal, although the healing part does not seem possible at the moment.  For the second time in my adult life, I have had to deal with the loss of my wife.  Chiara passed away in August after basically four years of living with and battling lung cancer.  She deserves all the credit for lasting this long as she was told more than once to get her affairs in order over these four years.  She was a courageous women who I am missing so much and will for a very long time.  I am grateful for having known her and I have more memories than I can ever list.  She made me very happy and that should tell it all. 

As I mentioned above, this is not my first time.  I lost my first wife, Janice, to cancer also, although she was diagnosed much later in the development stage (stage 4) and there was no real cure for this cancer.  That was 11 years ago, but these last four years brought a lot of those memories back.  Jan lived only 11 months from the original diagnosis, but there were so many similarities to what they both had to endure.  I am not going to note what they went through, but I will tell you they had similar goals for the time they had left.  That is what made both these women special and proved to me just what a lucky bastard I was to know them.  This point still eludes me as I do not understand what I did to deserve them but I guess I knew a good thing when I was hit over the head with it. 

As for these similarities, both women decided immediately that they would fight this disease with all they had.  Whatever the medications were, and there was Chemo, radiation, steroids, nausea reducing meds or any of the other dozen or so prescriptions that were required during their sickness, they took them religiously.  They also decided to live life to the fullest as long as they could.  They knew I loved to travel and they never took a back seat.  Jan's time was limited and there was really just the one trip to Colorado and Wyoming for sightseeing and experiencing the natural wonders of Rocky Mt National park, the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone. It was a trip we, my daughter and I would never forget.  She received support from family but also from work friends and her students who sent in hand made get well cards and posters.  At her viewing, it seemed as if the entire Chester County Intermediate Unit came out to pay their respects. 

As for Chiara, her situation was different and she was graced with a longer time span to take life by the horns and ride it as long as possible.  We were able to travel to many places in the past four years, most notably Italy 5 times, Seattle (like 7 times), Alaska, Maine, Arizona, New Orleans, Miami, Boston, and just this year, Hawaii, Lourdes France and Barcelona Spain, to name a few.  She pushed herself as hard as she could and, when things got more difficult, she focused on her granddaughter to give her the strength to carry on.  Our most recent trip to Italy was extremely difficult as she fully believed it to be her last trip back home.  And it turns out she was right.  She approached it as a time to see all her family and friends one more time. 

I was equally impressed by the support she received from her family from her first marriage.  There were numerous visits to our house by those in the Trenton and Dubois areas.  The Dubois group had to travel 3.5 hours to see her, and they did it multiple times.  But everyone was there to see Chiara and provide support that just amazed me.  They were even here on that fateful day in August and stayed until late into the evening as Chiara passed away.  I would have to say that if you want to look up family in the dictionary, I think a group photo of them is in that dictionary also. 

And now, I am once again, left in the aftermath of watching a loved one die before my eyes.  Experiencing this again only served to make it more difficult to live through, as I knew how she would suffer towards the end and I could not do anything about it.  I cannot help but feel that I still did not do enough to support her as there were numerous times I raised my voice at her because she did that to me.  She needed someone to dump her frustrations onto and I was not always able to take it without becoming angry myself.  This experience is one that I would never wish on someone else,  Each day brings its own set of ups and downs.  The house is filled with memories and they have a way of breaking you down.  I am in the process of slowly clearing things out so it is easy to spend long periods of time crying and remembering what we had together.  So far, each day has brought a minor change to my grief, and it is a little bit easier to face the day, but the sadness will be there until who knows when.  All I can do is try to bring my life back to some form or normalcy and see where it leads me.  I wonder what to expect.  Ten years ago I still felt myself to be young or at least new to middle age.  I met Chiara and she made me feel young again.  I feel much older this time around and I have my doubts about reaching a similar outlook.  I guess I will need to hold on to my granddaughter and my soon to be grandson just a bit tighter from now on.  Maybe they can take me to that place Chiara brought me to back then.  I can only hope.