Monday is Valentine's Day. It is going to be a very, very hard day for me. But not for the reason you might imagine. Even though I am enamored of a day dedicated to love, it has never been that big of a deal for me. Well, not since I was a little kid and then it was just a big stresser. I was always scared to death that I would be the kid in my class that didn't get any Valentines from any of the other kids. It never happened but I always worried that it would and that kind of took the fun out of it.
Dave and I never celebrated it because in his words "every day we are together is about love". That was so true. When we were together, we never needed one day of the year of mark our love. It was constant, all consuming, amazing and profound. If I were to miss anything on Valentine's Day, I would miss all of that, but since Dave died, I miss it every day and I don't need one particular day of the year to remind me. All the Valentine holiday ads in the media are about to give me a nervous tic.
No, for me this year's Valentine's Day is bringing up a whole set of other memories and I don't think it will ever be the same for me again. Last year's Valentine's Day was different. I think Dave knew it was going to be his last and he wanted to do something special, something to really celebrate so we made plans to spend the whole day doing some fun stuff. We had been spending a lot of time at doctor's appointments, getting tests, scans, infusions, etc. and Dave just wanted to have a normal day...the kind we used to have all the time. And he made a point to tell me he wanted to take me somewhere and buy me something special...a piece of jewelry maybe. He said he wanted me to have something I could keep and that was when I knew what he was thinking. I was touched in a way I can't put into words and won't even try.
I had wanted Dave to have something special for Valentine's Day, too, so I had written him a story. It was written as a fairy tale (it is published here under the title "A Fairy Tale") and it was a story about the two of us. I wrote about what my life was like before I met him and how he had changed my life forever. I wanted him to know how much he meant to me and how much I loved him. The story made me cry when I wrote it. It made him cry when he read it and afterward, we just sat and held onto each other for the longest time.
Valentine's Day was on Sunday last year and that morning Dave was very agitated and visibly in a lot more pain that usual. He said that his pain meds were not working at all and he felt like his legs were on fire. He also said he had this weird rash all over his back and belly and that it had broken out over night. When I looked at it I couldn't believe my eyes. I have never seen anything like it. I will spare the details but let me just say it scared me. He was is so much pain that I called the doctor and they told me to double up on one of his pain meds, which I did and it didn't to much good. By the time we got enough morphine and dilaudid into him to dull the pain, he was nearly incoherent. He finally went to sleep and slept for a couple of hours. We did that for the rest of the day and all night.
Because he was Stage IV at that time, his doctors were handing him pain meds like they were M&M's. He was getting the morphine every 4 hours and the dilaudid every hour or so. I have never seen anybody in that kind of pain and it scared me to death. One of his doctors said I should take him to the emergency room but Dave wouldn't go. He had an appointment the next morning anyway and he thought he could wait it out. Turns out the rash was shingles....his oncologist said it was the most extreme case he had ever seen. If you know how painful shingles are, on top of the pain of having bone cancer, you can get a small idea of what this pain must have been like for Dave. And all I would do was stand helplessly by and hand him drugs to try to dull the pain. I have never felt so small or powerless and it broke my heart into a million pieces.
That is how we spent our last Valentine's Day together and much as I wish it otherwise, that is the Valentine's Day I will celebrate this year. Happy frickin' Valentine's Day to me.
