Today is my late wife Barbara’s birthday. She would have been 59. Of course, she didn’t make it to that landmark. She died a little over ten years ago. I was there in the hospital when her heart failed. At 5:30 am, after about 30 minutes of CPR and other resuscitation efforts, the doctor asked my permission to stop those efforts. As I’ve shared before, I told him to “call it.”
The part of that story that I’ve shared with almost no one is what happened earlier that morning. I had spent the prior evening watching her suffering through what was probably her sixth or seventh episode of septicemia. She was in severe pain, and not at all lucid.
I determined to spend the night with her, but she was in the ICU. They didn’t permit overnight visits. You could stay in the waiting room if you wanted. A kind nurse noticed me trying to sleep in one of those horrible chairs, and arranged for a cot and blankets to be brought out to me.
As I was settling down for the night, I whispered a prayer to the Goddess. I told Her that Barbara couldn’t keep suffering like this. I begged Her to take this suffering from Barbara. Of course, I was asking for divine healing.
That was at about 12:30 am. I then fell into a fitful sleep for a few hours. You already know what happened. Around 5:00 am, another nurse came into the waiting room, and woke me.
“They need you in the ICU, now.” My heart almost stopped. I followed her quickly to the ICU, and well, the rest is history, as they say. You can probably guess now how I lost my faith.
I blamed the Goddess for (willfully?) misinterpreting my request. I blamed myself for not phrasing my request more clearly. “Surely You knew my heart.” How could She choose that response to my prayer?
Of course, that was mostly survivor guilt. I hated that I lived when Barbara died. At one point, I seriously considered going ahead and joining her in the Afterlife. Yes, I had a night of planning my suicide.
But I snapped out of that, and got some help. That didn’t change the anger I felt toward myself and the Goddess. It was many years of being lost without faith.
Yes I used the past tense. I’ve mostly forgiven myself. I’ve worked to repair my relationship with the Goddess. I realize that what happened was really for the best. I’m still pretty angry with the doctors, but that’s a whole other story.
Blessed be.
An Aging Trans Woman 
Leave a comment