I Promise: A Memoir of Love, Death and the Afterlife

By Linda Knappett

Military assassin. Bad boy biker. Mensa genius. One last chance to be the hero.

Rob Hutson knows how to deal with twists of fate when the enemy is clearly defined, but he’s running out of time. It seems like life will continue adventure upon adventure when a new adversary appears. The odds are not in his favor yet he whispers a deathbed promise. Even with the strength and love of his wife, Rob may not make it out of this one alive.

I PROMISE is the third book in the memoir series Love Beyond Stars. From the jungles of war-torn Vietnam to the Pacific Northwest coast, Linda Knappett leads you on a fast paced, heart breaking and unexpected true journey beyond the limits of ordinary existence.

Love beyond stars, love beyond death. It’s real. Buy I PROMISE today to find out if the promise is fulfilled.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Linda Knappett
• Release date: Mar 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781773024370

Book preview

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I Promise

I'll be here. Somewhere.

A MEMOIR

LINDA KNAPPETT

Table of Contents

Prologue

1

Just So Personal

2

I Seek You

3

Sixteen Summers Ago

4

Alpha Dog

5

The Excruciator

6

Stabbed in the Neck

7

Cars, Choppers and Explosions

8

Traumatized

9

Dinosaurs and Higher Education

10

You Ultra Maroon! Your Pacific Sunset Was a Bust

11

Trick or Treat

12

The Last Lime Christmas Tree

13

Thorns Grew Among the Roses

14

Bullying the Bully

15

Twilight

16

Attack at Midnight

17

Sex Talk, Bombs, and PTSD

18

Signs from the Aftersmash

Copyrights

Also by Linda Knappett

Love Beyond Stars series

Love Beyond Stars: Where Love Is Now

Love Beyond Stars: Floating in the Stream

The 10 Ultimate Easy Vegan Ways to Survive Holiday Food

The 10 Ultimate Easy Ways to Lose Weight

To the love of my life, Bob

Assassin in life

Angel in death

You have always been my Love Beyond Stars

Prologue

I’ll be here. Somewhere. I promise.

It was freezing in the furthest hallway of the Emergency ward. There was just one overhead blaring fluorescent light. You know the kind. Their annoying hum makes you squint. Old. Decrepit. I was wearing my winter jacket but the air on my cheeks was too cool.

I was anxious. So very worried. The love of my life, Robert, was lying on a gurney, in a hallway cubicle. If healthy me was cold how could he not be? He was frail, with pneumonia, barely alive. I had been with him there for a few hours of shivering misery. He said he wasn’t cold; but, come on! I was wearing a coat. In hindsight I guess he spoke with the voice of fever because his threadbare blue cotton blanket and cotton hospital gown certainly afforded no respite from the ambient conditions of that remote hallway. I stared at peeling paint of various ugly shades. I counted how many breaths he took before a coughing spasm turned his skin mauve. Anything to stop myself feeling or thinking.

That’s how it is here in the Emergency wards. Overcrowding means that broken limbs get initially assigned to hallways for a couple of days until bones can be set. If you are waiting to be assigned to an upstairs hospital ward (like my husband) you also get shuffled away from the critical area into the halls. If you are waiting for an X Ray, your bed gets moved out to the hall (the main hall where it is well lit, at least). Your wait can be hours or more than a day. The actual Emergency section is a square with curtained cubicles around a central nurses’ station that thrums and throbs 24/7. Robert had been admitted via ambulance one whole day previously and had spent his first overnight in a cubicle adjacent to the nurses’ station. In an exhausted fug I had gone home to let the dog out for a bathroom break and catch a couple of hours of much-required rest at 2AM. I was paranoid that he would die before I got back there.

The next morning when I returned to the Emergency ward I couldn’t find him! My heartbeats tripled into fibrillation and panic stomped its ugly, crushing weight through my chest. Finally, one of the nurses was able to locate him and I could, at last, catch my breath.

But he couldn’t.

Have you ever been close to someone who has a one-way ticket to death? Someone who has a disease that is never going to get any better? They are admitted to the hospital (always via ambulance), they rally, they come home. They return to an Outpatient Clinic for transfusions--or other intravenous medications--again they rally and then they come home. There is always the coming home to look forward to. Robert had a lung condition that had been slowly stealing his life for about a decade.

Why him? He never smoked a day in his life! How is that fair?

When I feel like being angry at Fate, I just scream things like that. Loudly.

His condition, known as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, is still a mystery even in today’s medical communities. Nobody knows how or why it starts. There is no cure. If it shows up while you are young, there is the possibility of a lung transplant but that was not the case for my Robert. In his case the initial impetus was likely Agent Orange during the Vietnam War and it took many long years of coughing fits to even get a proper diagnosis. By the time Bob’s lungs stopped sounding like simple asthma and delineated the tell-tale crackling sound, he was already too old to qualify for a lung transplant in our country.

We were always extremely careful to avoid exposure to anyone with a cough or a cold. Hand-sanitizer became my best friend. At each hospital visit (monthly or bi-weekly for blood transfusions, a non-emergency situation) we religiously wore hospital masks from the parking lot, to the clinic, and back to the car. Even now I can’t go into a hospital without donning a mask at the door. And hand-sanitizer is always in my purse. I haven’t had so much as a cold in the last six years. They can talk all they want about the chemicals in hand sanitizer. I love it.

Despite our precautions--somehow--Robert did develop pneumonia. He fought it off at home until one day he whispered, Call the ambulance. I can’t breathe. If you knew him, you’d know that he truly realized he was dying. He wanted it to happen away from home so that the impact would be less for me. He wanted it to happen where I couldn’t see the implosive ravage of death. I called the ambulance. They took him. They took him out into the winter night in just a flimsy blanket. And now he was once again in a cold hallway and I was just too scared to leave him, in case...well, in case when I got back this time...he…

So he reached out his scrawny arm and placed his hand in mine. He looked into my eyes and whispered, I’ll be here. Somewhere. I promise. But still, I couldn’t bear to leave him. In about an hour, he went for an X Ray. A couple of hours after that, he was transferred upstairs to a bed in a ward.

I’LL BE HERE. SOMEWHERE. I PROMISE.

For a few days afterwards, we both had hope he would be coming home once more. Treatment with antibiotics and other infusions was rigorous, but then his specialist made a visit. She told him that they would do everything to make him comfortable but that he would not be coming home this time. From that moment on, he gave up hope. Who wouldn’t?

An idiot male nurse phoned me about an hour after my last visit with Bob and said, We have him as deceased.

The man who loved me to the moon and back. They have him as deceased? The heart of my heart, my forever beloved, and they have him as deceased? A nurse’s job is not easy, but certainly, they could have devised a better script than such a phrase to tell a brand new widow that a precious life has ended.

Bob was never one to make idle promises. In fact, aside from promising to love me for as long as he could, he had never promised me anything before that day.

I’ll be here. Somewhere. I promise.

When I got the devastating phone call, I was at home and my family was present. They could tell from my conversation, what had happened. We had just returned from our very last visit, ever, with my one love. That was what had happened.

Right after that call, it seemed like the lights went out. Everything went black. The air. My brain. My heart. It was all just dark as if some cosmic force had declared lights out. I looked up to the ceiling because after-death stories always relate that the spirit leaves the body and floats upward. Even the ceiling was a frozen, lightless waste. Nothing.

But I knew that a promise is a promise and so I waited. I waited for the signs to show me that he still was here. Somewhere. Because he promised.

What follows now, are the words of the promise as they have unfolded for me. You’ll find your own story within these pages, too. Love. Never. Dies. The signs that show how love endures even after death are many; each one is a personal harbinger of hope revealing an afterlife of love. Love really is endless. I call it a Love Beyond Stars.

1

Just So Personal

On earth, we have a name. It serves to identify us as being separate from all others. With identical twins sometimes their unique name is all we have to enable differing identification. A name is just so personal.

When Robert died, I was hoping that he would reach out to me immediately. I knew to the depths of my soul that he definitely would try. In the meantime, I was crushed by his loss. My body had been a whole entity right up to the minute he died; thereafter, it seemed full of empty holes.