Why Did This Happen?

  When my husband died after fighting cancer, I could not help but ask why.? Why my husband and my children’s father? I had done everything I could to make the right decisions to have a family in the traditional way. We got married and then had kids. We had discussed the details of that decision ahead of getting married while we were dating. We both wanted children. We wanted at least two so they would have each other. We both came from loving families, but both our parents had been married more than once. We wanted our lives together to last for the rest of our lives. Little did I know what this was going to mean. I had no way of knowing I would lose my husband in his forties.

  I could not understand why he had gotten cancer after all it ran in my family. My mom and grandfather had died from lung cancer and my sister had breast cancer years earlier before he was diagnosed. Not that I was wishing it was me either. I had been careful never to smoke cigarettes. hoping to avoid the fate of dying in middle age. My mom had died in her forties of lung cancer and my grandfather in his early sixties. For Rob it just did not make sense he got cancer, since he had appeared healthy up until he was diagnosed with colon cancer. It truly is a silent killer. By the time he knew he had it, cancer had metastasized to his liver. 

We hear so much about having a positive attitude making all the difference, between living and dying. In his case, it felt to me at the time, that it made no difference at all. Why was that? From the beginning, my husband fought his cancer as a warrior on a mission and with as good of an attitude as you could have about overcoming it. He use to joke with the medical staff when they asked him about his medical condition saying “he was healthy except for cancer. ” Humor was one of his strong suits. He would get them to laugh and lighten the mood, despite the seriousness of his condition. Although he obviously hated going through the treatments, he never complained and was always open to anything new the doctors felt would prolong his life. He fought for three years long past the 6 months his doctors later told him they thought he had when he first appeared at their doors. At the hospital he got his treatments from, the staff knew him by name even some of the janitors. Other patients there would look forward to seeing Rob at their shared treatment times. This did not surprise me at all, because he had a way of relating to people from all walks of life and his charisma charmed almost anyone he met. Later some of these very same people would attend his memorial service. He had that kind of effect on people.

So I spent the first few months questioning why? It just felt so unfair it was he was taken from me and my daughter before his goal of seeing them graduate from High School. I might have been able to accept his death if he had been able to make it up until then since he had started out with stage four cancer. Why couldn’t he have been rewarded with a few more years for his valiant efforts to stay alive and his positive attitude about it? Didn’t he deserve this? How was this fair to any of us? I had already lost so many people before their time in my life, my mother, my older brother, and my grandfather? I wanted my children to have their dad their whole life! Why shouldn’t I feel like we had all been cheated? 

I do not remember how long it took me before I stopped asking why, Yet, I had to at some point because deep inside I knew playing the victim was not good for me or my daughters. So instead I stopped asking why and started asking what next. Asking why would not get me the answers I was looking for and would not make any difference to my present reality. Asking what next was the way I must go. I wanted a way forward and a way to live with the grief I was feeling. Envisioning my future without my husband not be easy. However, asking what next was a small step toward a more hopeful future in my life. It truly caused me to make progress the moment I asked myself that question. 

It took time to do this since all I had ever known was a past and future that included him. Yet, as the next year passed, I made a conscious effort to build new memories of happy times without his presence. I did this not only for myself but also for my daughters. It was not easy and often the loss of his presence was felt. I just kept going., Eventually, we had a past full of happy memories built without him. After all these years, sometimes when I look back, I think was this before or after he died, but in the end, it doesn’t matter. What matters more is I am building a life he would have wanted me and my daughters to have, one with happy times spent together.

Do I sometimes wish he was here? Of course, I do, but it’s not possible so the next best thing I can do is be happy despite the fact he is not. It does not mean I did not love him. It means I love him enough to live a happy life because he lost his chance to do so. Creating memories and a happy life which he fought for while dying seems one of the best ways I can keep a part of him alive in me.