no time off

I know what it is now. This surging, circling, wondering feeling in my gut when I think about Huz today.

I can't comprehend how he is processing everything that is happening with his wife, his love, the mother of his children, his best friend. I am all of these to him, and he is all of them to me -barr the mother part (!)

He has promised me that he will always be here for me. Always. With no time off.

That takes my breath away. That I have this offered to me every single day. This kind of deep, connected, intimate offer. Because 'being there' for me is absolutely a physical demand to care for me, take me to appointments, dish out pills etc, but it's also highly emotional. And that's a huge ask. Huge. It asks Huz to risk a lot, give a lot of his own heart.

And, because it's me he's married to, it also means he gets to listen. A lot. To the same content. Again and again. 

It's how I process. How I think. How i off load and make sense of it all. It always has been, but now the top topic of conversation is cancer.

Phew. That's full on.

And I just realised this. The 'no time off' part I mean.

What? no time off? chemo is SO time consuming...

Sure, he goes to work, mows the lawn (religiously, and I love it darling), he does our food shopping, gets to go on boys nights (sometimes, not often enough though), and sometimes he even gets to go the church and singlehandedly handle our mess of boys (I've decided that a group of boys should be called a 'mess' rather like a 'herd' of animals or a 'school' of fish).

He never gets time off.

I can see it in him as he leaves for work this morning. He has a tender due, has been working (unpaid) on it over the weekend, juggling looking after the boys, household duties, caring for me etc.

He never gets time off.

The past few weeks he has been trying to work out why my new medications are making me groggy and exhausted and have been making my skin crawl. He sits up late to put all my pills into my medicine box. 

He never gets time off.

Most nights he stays up later than me and watches TV. Tries to decompress a little from the day, escape maybe for 40 minutes and think about Jack Bowyer or some fictional worldwide disaster while he enjoys an apple icy.

But he never gets time off.

I know this because our hearts are so entwined that what is happening to me is happening to him, only it's so much harder because he has to watch it happen from the outside, wonder if I'm in more pain than I'm saying I am, heat me up endless water bottles for my bone pain, dish out endless Endone so I can keep keeping on, listen to my weary words and my desperate need to be heard and connected with.

But he never gets time off the gnawing reality that one day 'we' will stop being 'we' and it will just be him. I'll not be here anymore. And he never gets time off from that.

I don't think I can even be me without him. I don't even know who that girl would be, because the thousands upon thousands of strands connecting us overwhelms me, and how would we break those bonds...I can't even comprehend us as separate. And so maybe we never really will be separated. Perhaps our hearts will stay together after all.

Or I just desperately hope so. 

And each trip to church without me reminds him that one day it will be like that every time. And each time I have to stay home from an event, miss out on a family activity he is reminded.

I want so badly to give him 'time off'. Real time off from our reality. From my being sick, from him carrying both of our loads. Care free, endless, relaxed time off without a care in the world.

But he loves me so big, so wholeheartedly that even if he wanted time off I know he couldn't. Because as long as I'm suffering then so is he.

And that's love.

So now I'm thanking Jesus that because He first loved Huz and I, now we know how to love each other. 

And I guess that means no time off. For me or for my Huz.