[img]2624|right|Diane||no_popup[/img]Dateline San Francisco – On this four-month anniversary of Diane’s diagnosis, our 2½-day longshot trip to a mecca of amytrophic lateral sclerosis research was a cautious, putatively huge, success.
As soon as Diane’s signature is affixed to a sheath of documents and returned to Sacramento Street, likely Monday, we will be accepted into a 13-month program where the dual accents are on experiment and hope – especially for those of us who proudly, undeterrably, believe in miracles.
At the appointed hour, we spent most of an afternoon with a remarkably welcoming staff who almost made us want to change our address to San Francisco.
They were kind, gentle, insightful, sensitive. Both of us were ready to trade them, no questions posed, for a roomful of relatives.
Illusions were not allowed into the room. Reality was our host. As keenly alert as Sherlock Holmes, Dr. K, our neurologist, the second, or co-biggest, baseball fan in the examination room, perceptively declared, “No anticipatory grieving. Live one month at a time. Live fully today. Enjoy it. Don’t project half-a-year away, or even 32 days from now. Enjoy this month.”
This is his, and became our, Declaration of Independence from depressive thinking.
We expect to be making monthly trips to San Francisco for the next year.
Our time together was so remarkably, absorbingly, comforting that it almost will be like going home to mama.
It is, of course, easy as piffle for me to encircle the sun with my confident arms and spew optimism with my veteran mouth.
I am not the one who is smacked, daily, hourly, every time I sit down, lie down, with the spectre of a gaunt, haunting ghost scarily, disgustingly, peering over my nervous shoulder, waggling a bony finger.
I am not the one who lived to walk – and now barely can walk across a modest-sized room without my cane or walker.
Where Are My Legs?
I am not the one who rides the chair lifts up the two stairways in our tri-level.
I am not the one who – while loving to cook and create in the kitchen – no longer can stand long enough to prepare food. Someone needs to help.
I am not the one who has been living with the ugliest sentence known to mankind for 120 days officially, perhaps even for four months before that.
I am not the one. I wish I were. My constitution is much stronger. I would snarl at it until it cowered and retreated in irreversible fear.
Or maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I would walk into a blackened room, crumble to the floor and cry until the last available tear had been spent.
Not all of the persons on our two-person journey up the coast subscribe to miracles.
As her husband, though, changing or influencing Diane’s thinking, is the most demanding, exhausting, rewarding chore of our marriage.
And now if you will excuse me, I must return to learning how to operate our washer, dryer, stove, the gadgets with names like toaster ovens, and I don’t remember the rest, as someone just reminded me.
Please pray for her one time a day, “God help Diane.”
