A Never Ending Love

I am sitting in a waiting room of a large hospital in the Oncology Radiation Department while my wife receives a treatment for an acoustic neuroma; a benign tumor that is growing on the acoustic nerve between her ear and her brain.  This tumor threatens her hearing in her left ear and could cause trouble with the nerves on the left side of her face.  Doctors are treating the tumor with a procedure called  the gamma knife, in which they will focus a highly concentrated beam of gamma radiation onto the tumor in hopes that it's growth will be arrested.  In order to do this, doctors have to attach a metal contraption called a halo to Mealnie's head, using screws and screw drivers.

All this is going on now, while I sit here and type this.  They will not let me be with her.  They told me that she is in good hands; that she will be well cared for.  But no one will be with her who loves her and who knows her; no one who can comfort her the way that I can.  

Last night, in our hotel room near the hospital, Melanie and I watched a movie called "the Notebook".        It is a movie about a never ending love between two people; a love that overcame and survived all obstacles that the world put in its path; a love whose light shone just as bright at the end of their lives as in the beginning.

And that is why two people who love each other and have spent almost 38 years together; who have shared over half of their lives together; the good and the bad; the easy and the hard; should not be separated during a time like this.  I feel as if I have deserted her.  I am supposed to be with her and I am not.

There is a moment in the past that keeps running through my head as I sit here.  I was in Melanie's dorm room to pick her up to go out.  She grabbed her hair brush and stood in front of her mirror brushing her waist length black hair.  She took my breath away in that moment, and I stared at her trying to memorize every detail of her so I would never forget her as she was that night.  

But, as it turned out, I did not need to do that.  There have been many more moments in which she has taken my breath away.  And this morning, as I watched her walk down that hallway with the nurse, was one of them.