Things I know about time...

Time... There are so many definitions of the word. The clock time, the time we leave, the time we are born, the time as in clocking a horse or a runner. But today I will talk about the passage of time. Time doesn't stop for anyone. I learned that on the day that Sheila was going away to heaven. She had been in the hospital for over a month. They told me she wouldn't come home for a long time. Then suddenly, the doctors told me to take her home. Too elated to question, I lifted her into the van and smiled. My love was coming home with me and that was all that mattered. I had learned to clean her trache so that I could have her home. Eight days she was home with us. Time was forever again. We laughed, we talked and never once did I imagine what the eighth would bring.
On the morning of the 7th of March, 2006 she woke and said she didnt feel right. We rushed her to the hospital where she was given morphiene to aide with the pain. I waited for her to say she felt better, waited for what seemed like forever. She and I spent the next 6 hours watching doctors come and go. She was in and out of consciosness. Time moved slow for me and I wondered what was going to happen to her. She was taken to emergency surgery and that TIME was too fast for me. What was to take hours took but a few short minutes. The surgeon came to me and said she had only hours to live. My Angel was not going to be with me when morning came.
Begging the doctors to make her live was not going to ever come true. I waited alone, waiting for my daughter to arrive. I wished with all of my heart that time could stop for just a little while. It did not stop. Each minute that ticked away was one less minute I would have with the love of my life. Sitting beside her, crying as I tried hard not to let her see my tears, I realized that time was going to continue on. At two a.m. I sat down beside her. At 4:36 a.m. she went to heaven. This beautiful lady that had fought so hard for 24 years to live, was now safe in heaven. No more tears, no more pain, no more in a wheelchair.
Time... I am told that it heals. I am told that with just some patience and the passage of time, I will be better. What I know about time is this. Sometimes only the clocks move forward. Sometimes only the months on the calendar change. And sometimes, only the New Year makes it another year gone by. Life does go on as they say it will. You realize one day that time never stopped at all, even though you could have sworn it must have. That night... I wanted the clocks to stop so that her two hours were forever. Again, they did not.
A different write perhaps for me today. The approaching 2 year mark coming to quickly. I am often still there, at 4:30 a.m. on the 8th of March, 2006. So much of me holds to those last moments when I kissed her and whispered "I love you." The moment in time when she whispered back to me "I love you and...I don't hurt anymore." Time stood still for me...