My heart is sick, withered like grass, and I have lost my appetite. (Psalm 102:4)Which makes for a lousy Valentine’s Day. It is the second day after my second chemo-therapy and I feel as if I could sit down in a corner, pull a cover over myself and weep silently.
That, of course, makes it hard to get into the spirit of Valentine’s Day with love and romance and really neat dinners of heart shaped ribeyes you make your wife. I do not feel like eating and in fact, feel that I will throw anything I eat up.
Ella made me my favorite cookies yesterday. White chocolate and macadamia oatmeal cookies. I love them. But I have eaten a half of one. And it went down hard.
In addition to all this, I completely forgot to get her a Valentine card of any kind. She had a beautiful one waiting for me this morning as well as a hand-written love note. From me: zilch.
My mind just isn’t working that well. All I want to do is sleep. In fact, yesterday, I slept probably 20 hours of the day maybe. I have already gotten in two or three hours today.
I always prided myself on being a romantic fellow, but this year I am a bomb.
I mean, she understands it and she understands me. She knows that I am having trouble. She sees it in me, and she hears about it from a lot of other people who have gone through it too.
But still, the reality of it is harder than the account from other people. And I hate it.
I mean, it is not something that will affect the course of our lives together. We have already gone through almost fifty Valentine’s Days anyway. So one bomb is not going to cause us to derail from the train tracks of life. But the problem is that it is this year, and I would like to have it better this year since everything is going so tentatively.
And when it comes down to it, it is conceivable that it could be my last. The whole thing could go wrong and the treatment could fail. As the doctor tells you, you could die from this.
And you could. Cancer is, after all, a terminal disease if not treated. And if it had not been found, I probably would have been gone within a couple of months just from the starvation and inability to get any fluids, even water, down my esophagus. Maybe they could have done intravenous feeding but still.
That sets a totally different picture of Valentine’s Day to me. I do not mind dying. Not really. If I do, I go to be with my God in a place where there is absolutely no pain nor suffering. But if I do that, I leave Ella and she needs me.
Yes, others could do for her what I do, but others could not love her like I do. So she would have the physical love, but she would not have the emotional and caring love that only I could give her.
Ah, well. We leave our lives to God and let him work out what is best for us. He did not send the sickness, the cancer, but he can use it in both our lives to his glory. I would like to see how he will.
For now, I depend on her to know how I feel and count on the fact that she loves me and will continue even though I flop an occasional Valentine’s Day. And I know she will. She loves me, as I love her.
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