ALLOW ME TO PAUSE here and mention something. A lot of times women in this situation are out of their minds on medication. They drift in and out of coherency and at times they say things that make absolutely no sense. My advice at this point is if you hear something you don’t understand or something that hurts you to the core, try to remember that. It won’t be easy, I know, because to this day I wrestle with what Gina said to me that night.
When I was getting ready to leave things still felt pretty normal. It was snowing out so she told me to be careful driving home. There she was on her deathbed, and she was thinking of me first. My heart melted. But then when I told her I loved her she looked right at me and said, “Tommy…you still don’t know me.”
Nothing has ever taken the wind out of me like that statement did. Ever. I was completely taken aback and didn’t know how to take it. When I asked her what she meant, she just shook her head and repeated it. I didn’t know if it was the morphine talking or if she was being unabashedly honest with me. Either way, I walked out of the hospital in a mixed daze of anger, hurt, confusion, and fear. With all of those emotions in the mix, anger was the one that seemed to win the battle and rear its head. How dare she throw that out at me! How dare she challenge me to read her mind. What the hell did that even mean?
As I turned up our street, a chill washed over me. The air felt stale and still. When I walked in the house, it was different than it had been the night before. This time I could feel her absence. I was still fuming at Gina’s comment as I undressed and got ready for bed. But I calmed down enough to start running through the logistics of the hospice arrangement. I didn’t get too far though; instead I took a Tylenol PM and zonked out.
The next morning I got up and got the girls ready for school again. They were adjusting pretty well at this point to Mommy being in the hospital. I wasn’t going into the office at this point (obviously) so after dropping them off at school, I went straight over to see Gina. On the drive over, I was still obsessing about the remark from the night before and how I was going to address it. I was still thinking about it, when I walked into the realization of a nightmare. My sister Robyn stopped by to see how Gina was doing, and she was talking with the nurse in the room. Gina had taken a sharp turn for the worse overnight.
I stood there staring, utterly stunned at how bad she had gotten in just eight hours. Immediately I was disgusted with myself for not staying, but I quickly shrugged that off and got my mind in the moment. Being a nurse that deals with this sort of thing on a regular basis, Robyn has seen this play out, so she knew exactly where we were. She explained to me that there would be no moving her now and that hospice was no longer an option. It was imminent and in so many words, she told me it was going to happen that day.
My mind started racing a million miles a minute. My head got hot and my shirt collar felt as though it swelled so much it was choking me. I couldn’t move. It was as if everything around me was a moving blur but I was moving at the speed of molasses. I just sat next to Gina and stared at her. Tears were welling up in my eyes but they wouldn’t fall, so literally everything was a blur. I looked at her but talked to Robyn. The first thing I asked was if I should go get the girls but Robyn said no. She could read her breathing and even though it would most likely happen that day, it wasn’t going to happen in the next few hours, so she thought it best to leave the girls at school.
I’ll say this, thank God for Robyn. I realize most people don’t have a nurse for a sister but if you have anyone you can trust to be with you in that situation, I advise you do. Someone that can keep a cool head and grab the wheel when you freeze because that’s exactly what Robyn did, and I am forever grateful for that.
Robyn left the room, only to appear a short time later with a pastor who happened to be on the floor. He came in and held both my and Gina’s hands and prayed. Gina was so unresponsive and limp I had to focus to see if she was alive and breathing. Robyn left while the pastor was in the room and started making some phone calls for me. She called my folks and my younger sister. I imagine they called some friends because once again, word got around in a hurry and people filtered in and out all day. I just sat with Gina the entire time. I didn’t move. I don’t even know if I got up to use the washroom that day.
A lot of that day is pretty vague in my memory. I know I sat and held Gina’s hand the entire time, only letting it go so I could get up to kiss her on the forehead, but I really don’t remember most of the other events that took place. I do remember asking her to hold out for the girls and Jackson to come say goodbye. The morphine was pretty strong and she was pretty incoherent, so I don’t even know if she knew anyone was in the room.
Robyn went and picked up the girls from school. I don’t know what she told them but they were already crying when they entered the room. They went right to Gina’s side and started talking to her. They were so adorable and scared, and that’s when I almost lost it. All I could do was hug them and answer every question that came out of their innocent little mouths.
Little by little the room filled up around us. By 4pm everyone was there in the waiting room. My entire family was there, the girls were there, and some friends and neighbors had come by. I couldn’t really focus on it at the time but I was so thankful I had some people there with me and if you have any say so at all, I suggest you do too. It was a world of help at a time when all I could feel was despair. The only person who hadn’t come was Jackson. I tried to call him and I’m sure everyone else did as well. She never regained consciousness that night with the girls there. I let them come and go between the room and the waiting room. After all, the floor was full of cousins, aunts, grandparents, you name it. My mom had pretty much taken over watching the girls so I could focus on Gina.
It felt like a dream. That whole day, from the moment I walked in to the hospital, felt like one long, slow moving dream. As much as I was prepared for it, I wasn’t prepared for it at all. She was in so much agony, I began praying to God to take her quickly and peacefully. I felt a little guilty about wishing for my wife to die, but if you could have seen her agony. As the night waned on I became more and more intent on watching her chest rise and fall. I saw it get slower and slower, almost to the point to where a few times I felt my own heart stop because I thought she had stopped breathing.
The night dragged on slower than anything I had felt before. It was agonizingly long, but it seemed peaceful. When 11pm came I had my sister Ellen take Amber home for me. Jackie had asked me earlier in the night if she could stay, so I let her. She went to sleep in the waiting room with my mom while I stayed in the room with Gina. Jackson was still at work at this point. At this point it was pretty much a vigil in the room with people going back and forth between her room and the waiting room. There was a ton of people there.
I just sat there talking through the entire night. I don’t know if she could hear me or not. I know she was still physically alive, but with all the pain meds and edging that close to death, I have no idea what kind of mental functionality remained. Regardless, I let it all out. I told her how much I loved her. I told her I would take care of the kids. I told her everything I could think of, knowing full well this was going to be the last time I would ever talk to her.
Her breathing slowed so severely and had become so shallow I thought she had died. I just looked at her and felt this feeling rush over me that was a mixture of relief for her and sadness for myself. Oddly, I didn’t freak out like I thought I might. I can’t say the same thing for everyone else in the room. I can’t say what was going through my mind right then, but I just froze. I thought I had just witnessed my wife and best friend die.
An instant after that however, I saw her chest rise ever so slightly and realized she wasn’t gone. THAT was a weird feeling. It was like getting a dry run on watching your wife die. I kind of brushed it off in the moment and everybody around me seemed to as well. We were all so intently focused on the present moment that we couldn’t be bothered to think back to what we thought we had just seen.
We all let our guard down and collected our breath. Some retreated back to the waiting room while most of the others stayed right where they were. My mom went to check on Jackie and once she saw that she was fine, she came back into the room.
Then about fifteen minutes later, without any warning or fanfare, it was over. It wasn’t like in the movies where there’s this big moment or anything like that. It was that simple; one minute she was breathing and the next she just stopped. I saw her chest go motionless and when I looked up at the monitors, I knew. My body seemed to know as well because unlike a few minutes before when I thought she had passed, this time I just let go. The tears came rushing out as I collapsed onto the side of her bed. Every bit of strength and energy and emotion just came rushing out of me. My legs went limp, I couldn’t hold my head up, and I was exhausted with sadness and relief. You would have thought I had just run a marathon.
As you might imagine, when her monitors started to flat line the nurse’s desk was alerted. As all of this was happening and everyone was hugging me, I saw the doctor enter the room. My head started spinning into what felt like a whirlwind as I watched him approach the other side of the bed. It was like an out of body experience watching him check Gina for a heartbeat. Then at 12:15am on February 1st…just short of four months after we were told she had six to twelve months to live…he pronounced my wife dead.