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I am sorry for your loss, Zylo, and I believe I can share your pain. I lost my wife of 23 years to cancer at the age of 56 in 1993.

Riddled with multiple cancers, she had kept the illness hidden because she knew the war that would start over treatment, and she objected strenuously to any, having seen her father, mother, and several other close and beloved relatives suffer horribly. Not saying she knew she had cancer, but she must have had some inkling. The problem is that by the time we knew that it was more than just another migraine, just a mild UTI, or that the dry cough was not seasonal allergies, she was stage 4 everything, and it had spread to her brain.

Her prognosis was terminal from the minute we got her to the hospital, and at her insistence, and over the strident objections of our kids, she was taken home to pass in comfort.

Her regression was an horrible thing to see, and my tears well up just recalling, and at the last she was nothing more than infantile, lying in the hospital bed in the dining room of our dream home, and just waiting for the inevitable.

At 7am on the last day I awoke to her making sounds, as an infant will do when uncomfortable, and I struggled out of my cot, I couldn't sleep at all any distance from her, even one room away was too far, and noted that she had slid down in her bed and was all curled up and quite obviously uncomfortable. I reached down from the head of the bed to grab her shoulders and slide her up, and just then it was almost like seeing a light come on in her eyes, where there had been no intelligence for weeks, suddenly there was focus, and purpose, and the hands that had been curled in that stroke constricture opened, and she reached up and grabbed the back of my neck and pulled my face down to hers. As we touched lips, she let me up a little and looked up, and deeply into my eyes, and said "JIMMY!" and I knew she would be leaving that day.

And she did, 7:19pm 02/07/1993.

Sorry this was so long, it's actually hard to make it this short, as I am sure you appreciate.

I grieve for your loss and that you were not able to be by her side.

And I have a funny story about pagers related.