Love & Loss
Chris got to come home from the hospital last Wednesday, August the 2nd, and I couldn’t be more relieved. At least that part of this long nightmare has ended and the long healing begins (continues?) but at least he’s finally home. I’ve haven’t been to see him yet, partly out of fear and partly out of trying to find a way there and back. I don’t want to be a bother as I’m sure he’s just tired.
I went to have dinner at 100 Main last Saturday and talked some with Alexis and told her that if they needed anything - if she needed someone to come sit with him for a while, if they needed food, if she needed someone to talk to - to let me know. She said that he was finally eating more and more now that he was home. I was glad to hear that as he was starting to look rather gaunt and weathered in all the updates she sent. I’m terrified of how he will react to me, but I’ll never get through this if I don’t face it.
I had been struggling all day today to write him a letter to go with a blank book and some pens I intend to give him. Tom the RN suggested that it might help him jog his memory after I brought it up. I can only hope that after he reads what I wrote that there might be some measure of forgiveness and love between us once again.
The day before he got to come home, I woke to a surprise bit of news that I was not prepared to be hit with. I had opened my Discord to see William Cathey’s status as reading ‘Goodbye, Krysia’ with a broken heart emoji next to it. At first I thought ‘surely they didn’t get a divorce’ and immediately went to Krysia’s Facebook page to find that I was wrong, it was not a divorce, she had died. Not only had she died, but she had died eight days before I found out about it.
Like I get it, totally get it, that there’s a rift between me and my local friend group, not solely of my making but I do bear some of the blame. But to not be told or even considered that she had passed or was even sick is, to me, a personal insult. It’s the same insult I bore when mama’s cancer diagnosis happened and I wasn’t told anything (at first). I don’t understand why people want to leave me out of most medical things like this.
I didn’t know her very well but she had always been nice to me. She and William had always been welcoming at their apartment and one time during the winter of 2022 when no one else could make it because of work or snow, she came all the way to my house to take me grocery shopping. During that particular trip, I introduced her to the Knoppers in the picture above, with which she fell in love. That particular package had been sitting on my desk for over a week and every time I looked at it and thought of her and what she might be up to. She and I had always meant to hang out sometime and talk and have dinner, but we never got around to it. Time just got away from us. I’m sorry, my friend. I wish I had made more time.
