Dear Readers,
Please accept this apology for having written so frequently about my wife in the 52 days since she died.
Yesterday would have been Diane’s 70th birthday. And it was the morning of the yearly ALS Walkathon in Ventura, which we participated in last year.
It was a warm, sunny Sunday morning by the ocean, conditions reflective of our optimism. While we were not going to beat the incurable disease, we were going to whack it every day with a baseball bat, laugh at it and live as normally as we could –going places until Diane’s wheelchair begged us to slow down.
She was only six months into her diagnosis. On the first Sunday in October, we believed we could squeeze a longer-than-normal lifespan out of this ugly, randomly striking motor neuron disease.
I remember Diane’s vivid smile when coworkers from her office at the VA joined us as we toured the higgly-piggly course along the beach, through a commercial neighborhood, and back into a park setting.
Diane would work three more months as a beloved nurse practitioner at the VA, increasingly using a walker. Multiple veterans who were her patients proposed marriage to her. Her colleagues adored her.
The incontrovertible evidence:
Not only did they stream into our home in Diane’s final days, colleagues whom I knew only by name have become regulars – by calling, texting, emailing, visiting — in my life.
This past Friday, two uncommonly kind, insightful, imaginative VA physicians, Dr. B. and Dr. T., invited me to a 100-minute private session at the Federal Building where I consumed most of the oxygen recalling a litany of the golden values that Diane embodied.
We talked about the private Diane and the professional Diane, and it felt good to talk in front of people who were so extraordinarily fond of her. They will contribute chapters in a proposed memoir.
To my embarrassment, I still am not certain whether the main purpose of Dr. T. and Dr. B. was to boost my wheezing feelings or to create a public VA memorial in Diane’s name.
They achieved the first purpose, intentionally or otherwise.
Happy Birthday
The remarkably devoted Kate, Diane’s nonpareil caretaker from her forced retirement until her death, will take flowers to Diane’s grave today in Westlake Village.
Margaret, possibly Diane’s best VA friend, a steadying presence the past 52 days, will bring by flowers when I return home in mid-week, a welcome whiff of the aroma that was uniquely Diane.
