The Hour Glass Is Empty!!! Post #69

I returned home to Mobile around July 13, 2015 and began looking at everything in my world as 'in transition'. After all, Shanon would be coming home from seeing her dad and would begin her senior year, the last of my kids to be in school. Valentines Day 2016 held the promise of our secret wedding and then, though married, we would continue our separate lives until the girls graduated and over the summer of 2016 would begin joining two homes in two places and marry in October.

We were both ecstatic! Yet if we had listened to the

foreboding winds that chased us from behind and paid attention to the dark skies looming ahead, we would have realized that the sand in the hour-glass had just started falling. In an ironic sense, it was best that way because we would have lost the last bit of happiness and bliss we had looking forward to a future together. Perhaps our naivety was a gift!

But looking back, I'm not so sure Scott was naive, nor was I, had I listened to the winds howling out their warning. Scott asked me to open up a bank account in Mobile so that he could start putting cash into. I told him we would do that when he gets here. After all, the last thing I wanted him to think was that this was even remotely about 'money' for me. But he grew more impatient and even a little angry each day when he asked if I had done it and I told him 'No'. This was in late August. It was at that time that I began to worry that maybe things were not improving as he had hoped – health-wise. But he insisted that he was fine and then would again ask about the bank account.

He asked continuously what my hesitation was and I assured him we would do it when he came to visit because the money would be strictly for our future anyway. Yet he insisted that he wanted me to use it for whatever I needed. (I wouldn't have anyway! It would have been there when we got married!) I did worry a little about the reason for his insistence. Looking back, it was about that time that many of the things he said indicated more of taking care of things in the event of his departure from this world rather than joining our lives together.

Every couple of days, he would ask if we still had a date in Sedona on Valentines Day and I assured him we did. He would ask how 'we' are doing (something we agreed to do right from the beginning to ask “How are we doing” and discuss on a regular basis) and again, I assured him that 'we' were fine. He wasn't typically an insecure person but under the circumstances I wondered, “Was he afraid I would run?” And ya know what? Perhaps if he was not such a gentle spirit with an old fashioned – and may I say compatible - view on love, relationships and marriage, and if he didn't immediately impart to me his love of life and adventure and the prospect of sharing it with a life-long love, I can promise you I would have passed him by from the start. But as sick as he was, we had more fun, laughter and special times, and more heart-to-heart connection than I ever had with anyone! Every day was special! He gave me, in that year together, what I had been searching a lifetime for! There was no way I was walking. And I never did open that account.

On September 11, 2015, after stopping to grab a meal at Popeyes, Scott called me and told me what

he had eaten and that he was having stomach issues. For some reason, in my spirit, I knew his body could not handle this and that the dark clouds looming in the distance months back were now at hand. I began another prayer vigil as I had the previous spring, engaging others to pray on his behalf. But the clouds would not lift! That weekend, Scott was rushed to the hospital in a coma and never came out of it. The last grain of sand had fallen through the hour glass and Scott was free of his broken body.

Months of fighting, praying, hoping, miracles, engagement and celebrations, (basically living on adrenaline) suddenly came to a screeching halt as though I had just smashed into a brick wall. The silence was deafening and it made me feel as though I were in a surreal scene after a plane crash, wondering aimlessly not knowing what to do next or where to go. His funeral would not be for ten more days so during that time, I, like the rest of his family, had to go about my daily life as normal. I would go to work and conduct business as usual, going to job-sites and dealing with contractors and issues that seemed so minute, yet how could I even describe how unimportant this all was when I not only just lost my fiance, but my whole future that we had planned to spend together. And how could I convey the depth of my pain to anyone when the shell of my body was plowing through my work days as usual – and yet my mind and emotions were retreated somewhere within, as though I were doing a remote viewing of my world, or perhaps controlling the vehicle of my body from some distant location looking through 3-D glasses and using a joy stick to operate the mechanics of my own movements.

My office was on the 7^th floor of a downtown building and so many times I had looked out on the bright sunny days into the sky, and watching people on the street living their lives, with the knowledge that my life was about to expand with the one I love. But suddenly, no matter how bright the sun, all I could see was that suffocating gray cloud that hung like a thick fog over everything. I could not see where the streets led anymore, nor could I even direct a person to a parking spot on the phone from the 7^th floor like I had been so proficient at doing. There were no silhouettes dancing in this sky, only billowy figures that popped in and out of the haze, re-enacting, for me, the clues I should have paid attention to over the previous few months. I questioned everything. 'Did he die because he thought that since I didn't open the account I was going to bail on him?' 'Did he lose his motivation to recover because I was not there and he thought I wouldn't marry him?' 'If I was there, would I have been able to prevent this?' So many questions that did nothing more than bounce off the black clouds and reverberate back off the walls of my office bringing with them yet more questions.

Perhaps I would find the answers in Arizona while there for the funeral. And perhaps when I return home, this thick gray fog of nothingness would be gone, and I could just go skipping back into my life as though this were all nothing more than a wonderful, yet, tragic dream! But as I later found out, grief is that lump of coal in our Christmas stocking, the 'gift' that just keeps on giving, even when we don't want it.