One of the best Christmas dinners I ever had was sharing a turkey sandwich with my wife at her hospital bed in the Intensive Care Unit.

She was alive!

We raised our glasses of cranberry juice in a toast to a new year of hope and healing.

But fate had a different plan. In the following months her illness returned and there were more ambulances to our house in the middle of the night, and more anguished days in the ICU and more nursing/rehab homes until she could finally come home again.

And then in October, almost miraculously, she became stronger. She got her appetite back. She moved around the house, albeit with a walker, with a growing confidence and optimism. We went back to sharing a bottle of wine at cocktail hour.

Her sister in northern Michigan came down to visit and we all went out to a restaurant on County Road 9 and Susan bravely and resolutely edged her way up six steep stone steps to the restaurant.

CHRISTMAS CARDS

After her sister left, in mid-December, Susan wrote Christmas cards to a dozen or more friends and family for me to mail the next day.

The next day she got up around nine o’clock and went into the living room to take her many pills and watch the morning news. I came in and asked if she would like a cup of tea.

She put her hand on the back of her neck and said, “I have this sudden pain in the back of my neck. I think I’ll lie back down.”

I helped her back to the bedroom. I asked how she was feeling. She said she felt a little better now she was lying down. I said I’d make the tea.

I came back five minutes later to check on her. She was breathing heavily and had fallen halfway out of bed. I tried to wake her but she was deeply unconscious. I called 911. Help arrived within minutes. They tried to resuscitate her. She was still breathing but beyond revival. I followed the ambulance to the hospital. When I got there she was on life support. Brain hemorrhage. Severe bleeding.

A neurosurgeon was summoned. I asked him what he could do. “I could drill a hole in the top of her skull and relieve the pressure. But I don’t think it will help. There’s too much brain damage. We’d have to keep her on life support. Eventually we’d have to send her to a nursing home. She might never regain consciousness.” And then he added, “If if were my own mother I wouldn’t do it.”

THE DECISION IS MADE

The rest of that day and that night and the next morning I sat by her bedside and after heart wrenching phone calls to her sister and brother in Michigan, the decision was made. The machine was turned off. She lingered. I wept. Life ended.

When I got home later that day the Christmas card were still on the coffee table, waiting to be mailed. That never happened. Christmas never happened. My wife of thirty years had been reduced to ashes, currently contained in a heavy metal urn on a glassed-in shelf of the bookcase in the living room, now the dead room.

At that moment you give up on life and think about the best way to end your own. If not to be with her again, in some unknown dimension, cosmic phenomenon, an as-yet undiscovered state of wave-being, whatever — as one impossibly hopes — then to end your own unbearable pain without her.

As far as I know, it all comes down to whether she is in that unknown dimension — and being a woman of faith, she believed she would be — or if she is in a black void of nothingness.

If the latter is the case, then all is lost.