I don’t remember the ride home. But, walking through the door to our condo, Josh’s bed, oxygen tanks, Trilogy (breathing machine), Hoyer lift, wheelchair, medical supplies, and clothes consume the condo as if nothing had changed… Yet everything is changed. Emptiness permeates every inch of the condo and sucks all remnants of life away. Our lives will never be the same. What could ever fill the place Josh filled in our lives?
Scott and I hold each other and cry… Time hangs in suspension…
We loved and cared for him twenty-four hours a day seven days a week for thirty-five years. How are we supposed to move on? For right now we can’t… we don’t even try…
Things have to be done. Paperwork… agencies must be notified. In a stupor we stumble through each necessary step… a home for the Hoyer lift, the wheelchair, and the year’s worth of medical supplies. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find someone willing to take perfectly good unused medical supplies? The bed, oxygen tanks, and Trilogy need to be returned to the companies where they were rented. The day the bed is removed there is an absolute downpour just as they carry it outside.
As horrible as it was to have all Josh’s equipment and supplies here, it is worse with them gone.
Nothing feels real… but, it is… all too real…
We keep saying, “It will get better.” We just don’t know when.
One week after his death we pick up his ashes and bring him home. Josh always wore his hat and sun glasses when outside. We sit them on the urn.
It is less than five months before we leave Honolulu. So much needs to be accomplished to complete this transition.
Josh wanted to live in a Victorian home. He will! With us!
We sort… what to take… what to give away…
Patrick composes a list of what our home needs to be livable when we arrive.
We are not so much moving on as taking with us…
Josh! in our hearts, our souls, our very being…
No matter where we are!
