Release

One day when my husband was very sick I just couldn't stand it anymore. I had just left the pharmacy for what seemed like the tenth time in less than a month, picking up yet another prescription. As I drove along the winding road behind a strip mall, the pressure began building up inside of me to the point I thought I would explode into a million pieces. So I screamed as loud and long as I could. My throat raw and the blood pounding in my head,I felt like I had discovered my secret pressure release valve. Suddenly, I understood why angry young men threw bricks through windows, or teenage girls took razors and cut themselves, the release, the blessed release. During the last year of my husband's life, I screamed in the privacy of my car all the time. Sometimes, I even screamed a bad word over and over. Every day was a damn emergency.For ten years, I felt like a rubber band stretched between thumb and forefinger, ready to shoot across the room, or the world.

After the final chemo that sucked all but the last inch of life from him, Dan hung on for two more months, by the pure tenacious grit that defined him. His mind denying the inevitable, his body succumbed. Our daughters, old enough to know what was going on, and young enough to want to hide away, watched the misery of their Daddy's death. I've yet to reconcile that cruel fact.

The end of life ritual began and ended. The last of the relatives were crushed with heartfelt embraces and drove off in their rental car to the airport. We waved goodbye, closed the front door and went back to a different life.

The next few weeks were spent letting daylight back into the house. I purged every room that screamed or even whispered evidence of illness or death. I destroyed cancer's shrine. Then, spread out on a bed of fresh sheets, I melted like hot wax, into corners unihabited for a decade.