All The Love, H (H.S.)

nineteen

Olivia,

I don't think there is anything worse in life than witnessing the death of the person you love. Watching them take their very last breath, and holding them in your arms, knowing that there is absolutely nothing you can do to bring them back. 

Time stands still, and you relive every moment. Every touch, every kiss, every laugh, every word-it all raced through my head as the nurse began to unplug the machines that were keeping you alive one by one.

I knew that is what you wanted, you had been clear on that. "If its my time to go, I want you to let me go, none of that miracle stuff okay?" you had told me one night after I had told you about family argument I had witnessed in the ER earlier that day. 

Knowing that was what you wanted didn't make it any easier though. After the nurse removed your intubation, I sat and watched your chest rise and fall, until it didn't anymore. I held your hand as your body began to turn cold. And then you were gone. The love of my life was gone.

I tried to tell myself that letting you go like this was what was best. There was no life left here for you. But even I, medical degree and all was in a little bit of denial. This shouldn't have happened to you. This shouldn't have happened to us.

I fell into a dark place. I'd been to dark places before: during my parents divorce, after our first breakup, when we couldn't conceive, but none of those places compared to the darkness that filled my life now.

Everyone told me that putting you to rest would help bring me some peace, and maybe it did to some people. Maybe celebrating the life that you had lived and knowing that you were in a place provided comfort to your parents or your little sister, but to me? Well, it only brought more darkness.

It was easy to fall victim to the endless game of what if. A game that haunted most of my waking moments, and that kept me from falling asleep at night. What if I had been in the car with you on the way to lunch? What if we hadn't went to lunch at all? What if I had been the one working in the Emergency Room? What if I could have saved you?

What if a miracle would have happened?

The guilt was the worst, because I knew that I was the one who had put you in that situation in the first place.

I was the one who insisted on continuing to pick up night shifts, even though I knew it meant less time I could spend with you. It was also my idea to go to lunch in the first place, my attempt at keeping our life as normal as possible until our baby arrived.

I also felt the guilt of not being with you in that car. I had been so insistent on sleeping in that morning, that you had been forced to go on errands by yourself. If I had been driving, the situation might have been reversed, or perhaps completely avoided.

But the worst guilt of all came from knowing that you died in a place where I was a specialist. A place where I had saved lives countless times. I had this belief that if I had been working in that ER when the ambulance brought you in, that we could have saved you. If I had been there, I would have performed better medicine, and we would be together cooing over our new baby girl instead of you being buried six feet under while I barely held it together above ground.

I thought I had gotten my fair share of bad luck in my life. I'd suffered through my parents divorce at a young age, and a less than fostering family environment growing up. I'd struggled to make ends meet during med school in a foreign country. I'd lost you once, and almost lost you for a second time when our life wasn't going how we had planned. I'd learned my lesson, I wasn't going to give up on us-not for anything.

But apparently that suffering wasn't enough, because life had taken the one thing that I had to keep me on track, my compass, my anchor, the love of my life. I had nothing left.

How could you be taken from me so soon, Olivia? We had so much more to accomplish. We were supposed to grow old together. First raising our children, then watching them raise their own. We were supposed to retire on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean, laying on the sand as you journaled and I soaked up the sun. We were supposed to be that cute old couple, that after fifty some years still couldn't get enough of each other. When I took an oath to love you 'until death do us part' I didn't think the parting would happen so soon.

It wasn't fair. How could life be so unfair? How could what was 'meant to be' be me living without you in my life, trying to raise our daughter on my own? How could it our miracle baby be meant to be raised without her own mother, someone that had struggled for so long just to get to this point?

I felt guilty for thinking it. And I know that you were looking down on me from above in disappointment when the thoughts crossed my mind, but there were many a night when I wondered why the baby lived when you didn't. There could have been more Baby Styles, but there was only one you Olivia. There was only one. 

I didn't like this path of life. This is not what I wanted, this is not what I would have chosen. I kept trying to see the bigger picture, the lesson that I was supposed to learn. Maybe the lesson was that there are no true happy endings. That I was stupid for ever having believed that maybe our love story was one of the ages. Maybe life took you from me because it knew that I had forgotten how messy and hurtful love can be. I'd gotten too comfortable in my life with you, and life needed to show me a lesson.

It didn't matter what the deeper meaning of all this was, however. Because no deeper meaning could heal the pain in my heart and the whole in my life. I didn't think I could move on, because my entire life, the one person that I couldn't live without, was gone forever.

All the love,

H