Happy Birthday, Honey

The following post was supposed to be published in January, but never made it past draft status. While "out-of-date", there is information for caregivers that may help  keep their sanity slightly 
longer than they thought they could.  So here it is, four months later...

Dear Bill,

Wendy and I quietly celebrated your birthday yesterday. We started the day at IHOP for breakfast. You loved to go out for breakfast when you could still eat. I'm so glad we decided to go out and try different restaurants before your swallowing got too weak. It seemed that the first thing to go was your ability to swallow easily. Our mornings and nights out to restaurants came to an end within six months of the diagnosis. I missed those outings, but I understood your aversion to gagging and choking in the midst of other diners. Even with all the resources available from the ALS Association  and the ALS Clinic staff at Hines VA Hospital, it got so bad that eating at home was the only option for you at that point.

After breakfast we ran over to Menards for a couple items. I heard your voice inside my head saying, "I like Home Depot better," but I had a gift certificate for Menards so...  Once you were bound to a wheelchair, the only store you would go to was Home Depot. I think you worked hard to come up with things to buy there, but knowing you liked to wheel around the lumber and piping, etc., I tagged along. I think it must have been a sort of escape from the house and the constant reminder of your disease. It was therapy for you.

The same could be said for the theater. When you were still using the walker and the manual wheelchair, we saw movies practically every week. We saw more movies in those few weeks than we'd seen in the whole year before! Thank goodness for half-priced Tuesdays! But again, movies were an escape from our real life situation. For a couple hours, we could forget that we had a deadline.
We went to see the Star Wars movie. It was awesome. Wonder Woman we saw twice. Lots of Marvel movies made our list, too. There were so many others I can't  remember them all.

I'm glad we got out and did so much while "the getting was good". Like traveling. It was smart of us to take that vacation to South Padre Island while you were still walking, and the cruise while you could use the walker. We had so much fun going to the islands with our friends. My only regret is that we didn't get to Niagara Falls, which was a place you had really wanted to go.
The neurologist told us when you were first diagnosed to "go places and do things you've put off and you really want to do." Another way of saying, Get your bucket list out and start crossing off the activities.

The time we had from diagnosis to death went faster than we thought. Even faster was the ability to enjoy things. It took us by surprise, even with the warnings from the clinic team. We didn't go everywhere we wanted to go, visit the family members we wanted to see, talk about the things we should have told each other. Lots of missed opportunities because we ran out of time.

But the time we had was grand while it lasted, wasn't it? Maybe not the last 12 months, but that first 40 years of marriage?  I wouldn't trade that for the world.

Love you, babe,