I gaze out the window. Tiny flakes of snow slowly drift down coating the cars in the parking lot.  It’s March, days before a new season begins.

OK, time to go. Kiss your wife. 

I do as I’m told and I lean in and kiss her forhead like I would kiss my daughters goodnight.

Oh, you can do better than that!  

Under the eye of two nurses, I lean over again … this time planting a kiss on her firm, dry lips. How long ago was it that  I last did this? Five years? Six? The muscle memory lives on, but not the motivation. There’s nothing there – no spark of emotion beyond the concern for a friend. They might as well have asked me to kiss a stranger (or perhaps more appropriately – a roommate) on the lips. The feeling appears to be mutual. I squeeze her hand. You’re gonna be fine.

The performance satisfies. The pair of them – one pushing from the back the other guiding in front – wheel the bed into the operating room. I scan the room one more time. Busy nurses scurry about tending to half-a-dozen other patients in blue shower caps laying under brown blankets.

Family members surround an older man across the aisle. An elderly woman in a white button-up sweater holds his hand and chats away as though awaiting surgery is all perfectly normal. He tells her not to worry. A little while later, I talk with she and her daughter in the waiting room outside the recovery room. She tells me she’s hopeful as tears trickle down her cheeks. I wonder how long they’ve been together.

This is no time to think about or feel sorry for myself. Today’s surgery will be the first in a long line of procedures. I will return to this hospital to bear witness to additional surgeries, multiple oncological and surgical consultations, and the first of many rounds of chemotherapy. Over the course of a year, I have effectively become the sole provider for two children, a chronically ill woman and a pair of elderly parents facing their own health issues. I’ve dealt with a flooded basement and subsequent home renovations. I’ve had to legally defended myself from a mean-spirited, litigious neighbor. And all the while I’ve done what I can to maintain an air of normalcy given the circumstances.

“God won’t give you more than you can handle” offers a more spiritually inclined friend. And I can handle a lot. But, the one thing that breaks me slowly and inexorably is knowing that I was on the cusp of starting a new life and I’ve had to bury my heart to survive. A trapped fox will chew its own leg off to be free. I don’t have that luxury.

*****

And as I write this from a desk in a hotel room in Owego, New York, tiny flakes of snow are again slowly drifting down coating the cars in the parking lot.