A World of Lost Love

By Charles F. Sumner

A few minutes before my wife died, I found myself wishing for time to resolve our two issues, which we hadnt talked about. Falling in the bathroom and breaking her hip was one. She felt I should have run into the bathroom and saved her. I was not prepared to save her psychologically and didnt have time.

The other issue was a rape eighteen months before at the city swimming pool in the dressing room. My lady was a young seventy-six years old with Hepatitis C and blind. She had no strength to defend herself from a large and muscular woman, assaulting her because of a failed friendship. I might have hurried to save her from falling, and I did not take her trauma from her with love and through Jesus Christ. I was inhibited and failed her in her fall. I would have no freedom to live on if we hadnt been saved by Christ by the understanding I carried in my face. I sat down near her and prayed for Jesus Christ to come into my sorrow in my face.

My lady opened her blind eyes and saw my feelings with Christ of sorrow and smiled instantly, twice, with a huge happiness that Id never seen in her for over forty-five years of marriage. It was a smile of goodness and happiness, that she gave me an image of my wife ten years earlier, when she hadnt experienced rape. I thank my lady and Jesus for giving us this wonderful ending to her life and the resolution of our conflicts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Dec 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781449772772

Charles F. Sumner

I have forty-three hours in graduate work and a degree in journalism. I have always studied human behavior. This story is about the end of my wife’s life and how an assault on her at the city pool influenced her death and the last eighteen months of our lives. I live in Lake Havasu City in Arizona and have always loved the desert. I fish and go boating along the Colorado River. My avocation is reading philosophy and psychology.

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Copyright © 2012 Charles F. Sumner

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ISBN: 978-1-4497-7277-2 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-7278-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-7279-6 (hc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012919871

WestBow Press rev. date: 11/30/2012

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Epilogue

Chapter One

W e killed My Lady. I prayed for my wife’s recovery from a broken hip, impeded by Hepatitis C, a virus in her blood for twenty-eight years. She couldn’t stand up, because she had no vitality. Her nausea was ferocious every time she made an effort to exercise herself from the hospital bed to the bathroom. After the operation Dr.Seal, the bone man, told her, that she had no life in her to be able to recover from surgery and rehab her body. She was told by Dr. Seal, that she would spend the rest of her life in the nursing home. Our feelings for life and unacceptability of death caused both of us to hallucinate living again and picking up our lives together once more. The cruelty of a death sentence was not on our agenda. Even then, in the hospital, I did not ask myself why the bone man had to operate on a blind woman, who had a chronic disease? I looked up what the medical community said about the relationship between Hep C and a mended hip, which needed lots of physical therapy to ever get back to life again. The judgment was simple, no doctor in his right mind, should operate on a person who has a chronic disease, especially Hep C. Why had Dr.Seal performed the surgery of putting a split bone together with three screws, when he shouldn’t have touched it? Of course all three doctors had their reason and even hinted the wisdom of it to me, the survivor, why the bone man had placed the screws in my blind wife’s hip, when all three doctors knew she would not recover?

The big, burly Dr. Seal had flung sadness into our hearts, and her intern and liver doctor, too, knew, that she couldn’t live without the attention of many nurses and many pills for her high blood pressure and diabetes. She would live out her life in the nursing home. But she was sick all the time with her weakness and nausea. Hep C would not let her get well and walk again. When Dr.Seal came up to her room to tell me her condition, he did not mince words of real truths without make-believe, and I took them with me, knowing that My Lady would only come home to die. I felt helpless, that my God, who had done so much for me, could not do anything about it, either. I knew very well about the world of necessity, where life and God produced no magic of healing, even with the goodness and character of My Lady, who might have lived another two years with me. I was going to lose my only friend in the world, yet I knew that she would never accept the life of an invalid. Why had they counseled a surgery? Life had no logical order to it, except that God made our souls free and death was undetermined and often had no meaning at all. I knew that God had brought us together for forty-five years, and our meaning was very much tied to the end of her life, because she would choose God over a partial life, which took away her joy of living. She was not materialistic with the modesty of being poor.

Nothing left, she’ll have to be in a nursing home the rest of her life. I was afraid if I didn’t mend her hip, it might have split a few times and become inoperable. Why should you have to carry her on your back the rest of her life?

That is why you did it, for me? I looked at him with incredulity. He shook my hand twice, somehow believing we were friends. I did not understand why My Lady should have to die by choice instead of me.

Why did you operate in the first place? I demanded to know, but I suddenly realized their point of view, if I elected to take care of My Lady, and the choice was not made by three doctors, it would kill me, carrying her on my back, a metaphor of impossible love and limited physicality for a small man day in and day out the rest of my life. I understand…, I said, slowly.

I thought you would, and some day I will smile at you in a store, and you will thank me for it. We don’t think she’ll die. Did you want your wife to live in pain all the time?

Of course not, and I walked away in a mood of God almighty. I did not choose to be treated more importantly than my beautiful woman, who had much greater goodness inside her than I did. She was an angel with the character of having given everything she had to me, because she loved me. Her unselfishness made her a Lady, and her spirit for God made her an angel. She was smart, too, understanding the wisdom of everything, and never had to be the center of anything except to be in my heart with love. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth. Psalm 121:2. And I was optimistic and still happy to believe, that my darling lady would come forth in the nursing home with a few steps of therapy.

I waited two hours for her to come up to the room. I paced the floor nervously and made my mind believe that she could rehab and walk again. The doctor had shaken my hand twice, emphasizing his good intentions and wishing me well. When she arrived at the room and sat up in her bed, she squeezed my hand tightly with sublime belief, that she was going to make it. My Lady was at her best, full of our spiritual God, strong and determined. She possessed vision without a glance of death in her furious mind. She was extraordinarily rich with inner beauty. God had made her blind in her inner suffering most of her life for this moment. I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also: I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understanding also. 1Corinthian 14:15.

I don’t believe him, how does he know that I can’t walk again? Does he think he’s God? My darling woman would not believe that she was an invalid and was going to die.

I hardly slept that night. Ciela, our black and white cat, was grieving for my wife and clinging to me in bed throughout the night for her security, knowing that her mother-angel was sick and going to die. She compensated her loss of love by touching my body all night. I realized that Ciela would become closer to me than before, because our holy mother was going away. It was over forty years, that I had given her cats, three of them, including Ciela, which carried a four plus allergy for me. Yet, I never reacted to her and remained healthy all the time, because I needed to love her, which God made possible. My wife had grown up with cats and always needed one in our household to love. I knew that without my wife one day, that Ciela would give me love and existential purpose to live. Every time I woke up I thought of my wife carrying the burden alone of her assault by a friend for the past year and a half, the trauma of being raped at the swimming center, which I had not taken from her and buried in my unconscious mind, effacing the nature of my past realities. Inside me, too, was the guilt of not running to her in the bathroom to save her from falling. She believed I had time, but in my hesitation from behind the coffee table of not having settled the issue of her rape, I fantasized her trouble as nothing with one bad leg from lifting a container of wall street journals into the car. I did not move quickly. Two issues in our minds and hearts were slowly stealing our love away from each other, and we became helpless in overcoming them. Before dawn, I remembered my Grandmother and her favorite quote from the bible, when she spoke to me as a child. Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me….. Psalm 23:4. It always gave me peace, especially listening to her spiritual voice.

Allison read her tapes for the blind daily and became a sharp, brilliant woman, only interrupting her reading in the evening to go to the refrigerator for her ice cubes, which took care of her nausea, temporarily. I think she had a drive to keep up with my own improving, driving consciousness. How could I live without her? She was the source of my energy, my pleasure, and I trusted her in every way. She was my conscience and arbiter of everything in my life which might be wrong and causing us pain. Mostly, I didn’t have to succeed with her modest pressure.

When she was depressed and stayed in bed four weeks a year and a half ago, not even going to Church moved her. She called it a flare up of Hep C. It put her arm in pain and made her psyche feel like she wanted to die. Her feeble defense in the dressing room had given her pain in her forearm. I want to die, she complained. Im going to bed for a year. We had to laugh at that, it was funny and absurd. What she needed was to go to her doctor for her pain, because it had made her immobile. I pleaded with her to go to the store and out for dinner, but she had no desire to do anything. When I bought a mattress for her instead of a toilet extension, using only what our budget would allow, she was glad to get a better rest overnight. We never talked about losing a lot of our money in the stock market, because it was too depressing for us. It is easy to understand why we didn’t live well and lost our money and lived in an either or situation. We were both dysfunctional, dreamers from our upbringing. I had no idea that my wife had a forearm pain from the heroic task of protecting herself in the dressing room from a large, healthy woman ten years younger. She hid it from me in order to protect me from reality and secure my love. Even her visit to her doctor did not reveal anything to me, except she’d told him and repeated it to me, that she had nobody to take care of her in old age. It was a bold lie, she knew my love extended to everything and it was forever. Why then had she told her doctor a lie? It was that she was ashamed of what had happened to her at the swimming center. She carried her trauma well without communicating her suffering to me. And I went on with my suspicious love for her, not knowing the truth in ourselves and believing her sickness was from her Hep C.

Once her feisty personality put her arms around my diseases, witnessing God’s love for me by lifting my sicknesses, even cancer, anxiety-driven asthma and COPD, eczema, a deformed foot, hip osteoporosis and a dysfunctional heart, all of which were taken from me by God-driven miracles of Divine love and my own wish to suffer like His Son, Jesus Christ. My Lady had learned that I was a spiritually gifted man, her savior of forty-five years. I would have given up my life for her, as she would me and did eighteen months later from her wheelchair at almost seventy-five years old. Going back to the time she got out of bed and decided to live, fighting the hurt inside her from the assault, she became determined to become her own person and take away my domination of her decisions.

I shall get out of bed, if you allow me to have my own judgments and my own way of seeing life. I don’t want you interpreting anything for me or what to do all the time. All right?

Yes, Love, just get out of bed and live, and I’ll put you at the head of the family. I smiled at the irony, and she smiled at me, too. God, I love you, what do I care about whose ideas rule us. I care about you. Even God deals out the rotten to people in the Purgatory of life.

It was because she had decided to forgive her linebacker friend of seducing her and knew that I would not agree with her. In fact, in truth, I wished to get the psychological problem out of us, when I’d learned what she’d gone through, and sue her insane friend for everything she had. Of course it was not Christian and Father preached to us to forgive the woman and get on with our lives. But he didn’t know that we would carry it from our ancestral truths, until we died.

Kat attacked me in the dressing room, when I took off my bathing suit. My God, I would never do that again. she stated, with a touch of disgust. I will not swim again, and I will not sue her. I will forgive her, as a Christian. I do not persecute, and no one’s taking away my identity. I even have compassion for her. Enough said? She looked like a child of love.

Yes. I had a heavy heart, while she had been pushed into great passion and character in order to find the grace to forgive her assailant. She looked very sure of herself.

You saved me from becoming a sinner in life, and now I will save myself.

I saw her passive nature, which had helped to cause her blindness at Michigan State at eighteen, thrown to the wind. She would always be more assertive now, but I welcomed her voice back in life, in spite of the changed world we had to live in, a world which had a loss of love between us. I forgot about her trauma completely and thought we were back to normal, because she was tough enough herself to live with it, and I was a dreamer of better things. Her suffering would be tested inside herself, while I did not perceive her interior battle and settled into a state of forgetfulness. I believed that I was normal and loved her as much as ever.

It was all right with her to hide the assault from me by complaining of chronic pain in her arm and head, passing it off as an attack of Hep C, so I would hold conviction, that her sickness had nothing to do with an assault at the swimming hole. She was determined in the beginning to not connect it with a friend, who had perceived, that her passive nature might be taken advantage of, and satisfying herself for not being socially good enough for my wife’s company. Kat would find a punishment of her in time. All, that the linebacker woman had to do, was wait for the right time after the snow birds had returned home and thinned the place out to assail her.

I have my own way looking at things now, she continued, independent of my opinions. I’d never hurt anybody. She stared at the sheets in disgust. I always liked Kat.

I shook my head in despair and welcomed her voice back in my life. I hadn’t known, that I played on her passive nature in the past, because I’d never appraised the freedom she had given me in my own life. Stupidly, I thought that her disease was making her more assertive, but in fact it was her dignity, that she was fighting for. If only she had been assertive and actively described everything that happened to her, but she was too shy to talk about it, while I sloughed the violence off as a hurt, which only lasted a few days, before she was sick in bed, as a fallen pheasant in the wilderness. I did not pursue Jesus Christ, His love, in bringing us together and achieving a permanent end to our troubled waters, from a Beast, who imagined that my lovely wife was going to become her lover. I can only say that Mankind does lead lives of psychotic desperation. My Lady had been pushed into courage and strength inside her incomparable character in order to find the grace of compassion for her assailant friend and forgive her with the innocence of a child. Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 18:3 Was she not looking more and more like a child of love because of the virus, Hep C, in her bloodstream, too?

Is that why your forearm was in pain, when I picked you up that day?

I had to defend myself, push her away from me.

After an hour in the pool, and you have a debilitating liver disease which takes your energy? Not to mention you’re blind. I’d like to kill that woman.

Kill? You’re a Christian, how could you kill anybody?

I love God, yes, but I hate Kat more. Unfortunately, there is no Hell, only God’s love.

Then you need to work on that. To love Jesus is always gain, remember?

I do, something you have told me more than once. I am not spiritual enough.

We had humble beginnings, an easy picking off for a mean, disgusting woman in the dressing room, especially when she’s been encouraged by her evil husband. I call him evil, because he should have stopped her, and they would not have become an abomination.

We are modest, without decorum, aren’t we? Remember where I made love to you and proposed. And you said yes right away, because you wanted something to hang on to? Well?

In a wheat field with farmers all around us looking out their windows at our car.

And one called the state police, and when I told him I had just proposed to you, he congratulated us and let us go. We were going to make love in the middle of a wheat field.

We were not, I would never do such a thing in public. She smiled, impishly.

I know you wouldn’t, Honey, but we loved each other, didn’t we?

"I’d lost my ability to love with feeling, you brought it back to me. Every day you told me, that you loved me more than life. God gave two lost victims a crack at living, again. We had substance, we were worth the gamble. We started a spiritual relationship in a puddle of love in a wheat field, and it grew into the character of our man-God, because our natures invited the whole world to sit up and look at us, a blind woman and me. We were