36 Days

When asked how we met, he would always answer, "She was my babysitter." We fell into each other from the start, although it would take a dozen years before we actually connected at the deepest level. I haven't written the middle part yet, our years together as he struggled with depression and alcoholism. Those are hard years to write about because I suppose I just want to remember the main thing - he was the love of my life. And one day, his sister calls me, "Alex is dying." You can know, really know, that this is coming, but somehow hearing the words knocks the soul out of you anyway. "Where is he?" I ask. It turns out he is in a nursing home less than two miles from me. There is no thought process. I just go to him. And I stay with him all the way to the end, for 36 days.

I promised him that I would write our story. I would write the rest of his story. I find that I cannot do this though. Perhaps someday, but not now. For now, all I can do is write about these 36 days, these 36 days that we had to forgive and love one another again.We were always finding one another. Losing and coming together over and over again, always trying to get it right. And in the end, we were left searching for the answers to all of the questions that were not able to be answered, the answers to what happened to us, to US. After nearly nine years apart, we found one another again and spent 36 days searching for what we had lost.It was in the searching, finding, and searching again that we found the one constant, the one thing that was never lost. Amidst the rubble of our life together, the love never died. We didn't even have to look for it after almost nine years apart. We found each other again. Even in the dying, we were found.