Lies in the End

This story contains sensitive content about death and dying. Reader discretion is advised.

Before my husband John made me a widow, we spent all our time deceiving ourselves.

His condition, his disabling chronic pain, worked with him to hide the truth. Chronic pain had no issues with maintaining the ruse.

John blamed the chronic pain to explain why the doctor was wrong when he tried to get him to take heart medication. The doctor was incompetent, he would say. John gets stressed at doctors’ offices, so he reasoned his blood pressure always goes up. We eat fine. He was in a lot of pain that day, he’d tell me. When I begged him to explore the idea of going to different doctors to try and help bring him a bit more comfort, he remained convinced that the entire lot of them were incompetent; they could offer him no help, and he was not willing to become a pill addict.

Over the past year, he manufactured reasons to explain why he didn’t feel well, his chronic pain and asthma excelling in hiding the truth because he had something else to blame rather than the real source of his ailments. His neck and back did hurt him constantly, but after a while, a mysterious shoulder pain cropped up. Chronic pain, always happy to take the hit, became the reason for its

appearance. When breathing issues appeared, asthma happily stepped in and worked in partnership with chronic pain to create the perfect delusion. His asthma must have appeared again because of the extreme back and neck pain along with the somewhat new shoulder pain, we thought.

John cannot shoulder all the blame. His chronic conditions pulled me into their web of deceit. They took advantage of the fact that I love that man beyond reason, the one thing that will always endure although his physical body can no longer be with my son, daughter, and me, his loving wife and best friend.

For the last thirty years, twenty-seven of which offered him decades of pain, my soul purpose was to bring him as much comfort and alleviation as physically possible. I made it my mission to erase every grimace of pain flashing across his face. I attempted to be his caretaker and masseuse. I learned about acupressure and used it to give him good days where his eyes were not clouded with as much pain. I did everything in my power that was within my capabilities to be as there for him as he was for me.

Because I was so busy trying to provide him comfort, his chronic conditions took advantage of it and distracted me so that other possibilities didn’t enter my mind. It couldn’t be anything else because 59 years was too young to die. I honored his wishes and supported him because he is the one person I could trust in an entire lifetime of relationships. I believed him, so if he felt that way, it had to be true. He was right about so many other things, so I became a willing participant in the deception and actually believed it until the end.

John had the best day one could manage with multiple health issues on his last day. He visited the greenhouse he and my son built together and took joy in the few plants he could nurture despite the overbearing heat this summer. He sat in the garage next to his 1965 Dodge Dart, and he heard tree knocks, a sound often associated with bigfoot, which made him very happy. He watched the Jets

with my son and daughter, and at night, he and I watched a bigfoot show where scientists poured plaster into real bigfoot footprints. During this show, chronic pain and asthma could no longer maintain their lies.

Death, life’s only absolute truth, stepped in and revealed the real problem. Only upon passing did we learn that John’s blood sugar was at dangerously high levels, which snatched the life out of him so abruptly that he didn’t even have the opportunity to struggle for one more breath, like a light switched off. I screamed, cried, and begged for him to stay as I struggled to administer CPR. The crew arrived and continued working on him, but he was gone. My vision of growing really old together had been just a fantasy. 

Death revealed all the gifts he left behind. He was everything to me, but he left so much of himself in all the love he poured into our family that I am fortunately not left with nothing.

All the work he had completed to establish our life together played in front of my teary eyes on our way to the funeral home like a movie. My daughter and I held hands while my son’s girlfriend drove, and he and she chatted about the future. As I gazed out the window, the hills of the Virginia Appalachia Mountains rolled on

by as we neared the building temporarily housing my husband’s body. We would see him again for one last time in a few days, his long white hair, mustache, and beard. It had been a warm September, and the hills had all season to don a brilliant green coat of plants and trees, decorated with Black-eyed Susans and

other late-summer wildflowers. Farmhouses stood in defiant red. Cows and horses dotted the fields. I spied my bright green eyes, red from crying, and my blond hair in the reflection of the window glass. He even managed to dye my hair for me before he died. He brought us here and helped us build a life full of love and strength. He took care of us, loved us, and influenced us in every good way possible.

Death reveals all the lies we tell ourselves in the end and exposes our folly. It ends all opportunities to make amends. Now, I must learn how to live life without the best person I have ever known and my best friend.