Life was perfect a year ago.
A year ago today I graduated with my bachelor’s degree, I was so proud of myself and I was so excited to start my life with my partner.
I told Matt our entire relationship (5+ years) we needed to wait to move into together until after I graduated with my bachelors degree, then we could move into together until, he could officially propose and then we could get married the next year. That was our plan for over 4 years.
Once graduation came along, we had known Matt had a mass in his kidney and they were going to try and do a partial nephrectomy to remove it in a couple weeks. So we had postponed moving out immediately until after he had recovered and gone back to work, but everything was supposed to be fine after that.
Then surgery came along and they had to remove his whole kidney because the tumor had grown and the kidney looked terrible and they took the whole thing.
Then the tumor turned out to be a rare cancer. And he had to start chemo.
Then chemo was 7 days a month, average 6 hours a day, and it took so much from him. He could work. He was exhausted. He was always exhausted. He felt horrible about himself. And he was constantly at risk of getting sick. He/We skipped holidays so he didn’t risk being around anyone. He was so lonely, all he had was me, and I tried to be there for him to the absolute best of my ability. We just needed to get through this.
5 months into chemo and he was almost done. He had two months left. Over the course of a weekend an infection had turned septic and he declined rapidly and he had no idea how bad things were. We just thought he was sick after chemo like usual. Until we finally realized how bad things were.
He wasn’t even in the hospital for 13 hours. He couldn’t breathe, his organs were shutting down do to the septic shock. They wanted to put him on dialysis because his one kidney couldn’t filter all of the bacteria out of his blood, but his blood pressure kept dropping and he was already in four medications to try and stop that, but dialysis likely would have tanked his blood pressure and there would have been nothing else they could do. They restarted his heart four times. It’s didn’t restart a 5th time.
And now it’s been three months since he’s died. My world has completely crumbled. I’m a shell of a human being, like I died with him and now I’m a ghost that haunts my life as I knew it.
It’s his birthday tomorrow. He would have been 25.
It’s my birthday the next day. I’m turning 23.
I don’t want to. I don’t think I can take it. I miss the life we shared. I miss everything about him. I miss him so much. We would have had such a beautiful life together. He deserved so much more time.
I miss how perfect life was a year ago. I miss how perfect life was supposed to be for us.