Continueing from Guilt and Regrets...

I spoke of the Guilt that I felt over so many things with Sheila. The inability to watch her hurt as I had for so many years. The needing a place to be where I was able to feel disconnected from all that made me feel guilty. And through it all i learned that a "doorway" or a wall was not ever going to keep those feelings away. My love for her was simply too strong and yet, there I was. The guilt, the hatred of the man I had become and the feelings of unworthiness had taken over where strength had once stood.
And were there regrets in all of this? I might say Are in place of were for that question. My answer of course would be Yes! I have heard something said to me by a million people, including Sheila's Doctor, who happens to be my doctor also. "You gave her 29 more years than the doctors gave her just by loving her." "You made her life more enriched and gave her reason to live and endure all the pain just because you loved her they way you did." "Without you, she would have been in a home or worse." All of these words mean very little when you are Me. Yes, I stayed beside her for 60 days without going home when she was in a coma. Yes, I never once let her feel as if she were too much for me. And YES!!!!!, we lived the life of adventurers and saw the world while living. Ours was a love for all times... the fairytale love that would'nt fade when the last star went out. but did it all pale in the light of where I went?
My regrets were never the life we lived. Regret is defined as a sense of loss, disappointment, dissatisfaction. It is a feeling of sorrow or remorse for a fault or an act one has done. And the strongest definition of Regret is this: {A sense of loss and longing for someone or something gone. A feeling of disappointment or distress about something that one wishes could be different.}
When the Bipolar really took hold of me, though it had been there for a very long, long time, I did things that I can NOT ever now take back. To me, guilt becomes Regret when the things you feel guilty for can no longer be fixed or changed. When My Sheila went to heaven... the chance to make things better, to make a very worng a right again was no longer within my grasp. I could not turn to her anymore and say "I am sorry, My Love." I would never be able to celebrate our 25th anniversary, only 6 months away from the day she went to heaven, the way I had planned in my silly little bipolar mind. I could not LOOK at her and touch her face and say "I love you more than I love life itself."
I told her weeks before she went to heaven, not ever believing she would leave me, that I was still In Love with her. I told her that no matter where I was or what I had done, I was still her man and she would always be my girl. She told me her love was for me only for ever. Oh how I cried that night when i got back to my side of the duplex. I wanted to be all I had failed to be for her. I wanted to never let her think for a moment that my love for her wasn't everything it had always been. But I could not now. I CAN not now! Yesss, I know... She knows. I hear that each and every day too. But it isn't the same.
I regret having needed to live alone as such. I regret not reuniting and living in one single dwelling as man and wife as we had for 20+ years. I regret, as the definition says, that things could not have been made different before she went to heaven. I live with this each and every single minute of my life. How I want to reach out and pull her from heaven... to hold her and tell her how MUCH I miss her and love her. How I am sorry for breaking her heart and hurting her because i was too weak to stand tall sometimes.People looked at us and said "He is such a good man. He is so strong for her and stands by her always. He is such an angel."
They just have to turn it around. She was MY strength, She was the strong one and SHE was such a good woman. She was everything the world thought I was. She was and still remains My Angel. And I REGRET that I can not change what I did now because regret comes in it's strongest form AFTER it is Too late to make a wrong... a right.
And the tears I cried while I wrote this for you, the tears I cry at night for what I can not forgive myself for, perhaps make me just a little bit more worthy...