Category: Life

It had been over a month since my husband and I were in our house. Our new home had become a sterile room with a roll away bed, one pull out chair, and a constant beeping sound from carts with bags of medicine hanging from them. Around that time we heard the first utterance of what we imagined day in and day out, but sometimes still couldn’t believe was ever going to happen. The doctors told us we were almost ready. We were getting close to walking out the doors and onto the rest of our lives.

Those words brought me ecstatic joy, but I also knew that the hard work of rebuilding our marriage would also begin.

About a year before going into the hospital, John’s and my relationship began shifting from a typical, healthy, newlywed marriage of depending and helping each other to one where I took care of him every day – preparing meals and bringing them to him, helping him get dressed and prepared for the day, making phone calls about prescriptions and insurance, and consulting with teams of doctors on what treatment was next. One weekend I had to travel to Georgia for a wedding, and my dad had to come up to stay with him.  Overnight trips to visit family and friends became no longer possible, and my errands had to be run quickly.

Our relationship shifted from husband and wife to child and mother. This is not what any young, strong man who desires more than anything to be seen as such wants in his life. He wanted to take care of me. But he couldn’t.

As we moved back into our house and John got stronger, our roles would have to go back to the way they were supposed to be.  Otherwise our marriage would never be what it was meant to be.  I would have to learn to let go of the child needing a caretaker and let John return once again to the strong man he had always been on the inside.

The rebuilding was not easy.

Maybe it was partly because our marriage was so new to begin with, but it was as if when we walked through our front door we were walking in for the first time as a married couple. We had to relearn marriage. We had to relearn our roles. We had to relearn what we were both good at doing. We had to relearn communication.

And I had to relearn how to submit.  It was time for me to let go and allow John the freedom he needed to heal – not only physically, but emotionally and even spiritually. 

It took time and even some arguments, discussions, and then more discussions, but through the rebuilding John transformed into a husband again. And I transformed into a wife.

Back in those days, when my husband’s heart could hardly hold him up, I would get home from teaching all day and my night job would begin.  It was a night job I did not sign up for or expect or want.  But it was one that brought me to my true purpose – to be a helper (Genesis 2:18).

I quickly learned how to do the big jobs like mow the grass, get on ladders, and move heavy things because there was no one else to do it.  However, it was the small jobs that made me miss my husband even more.  No longer could he take out the trash or grill his famous steaks outside.  No longer could he sleep close to me at night. 

After getting home and finishing my night jobs, then the rest of the night began.  It always started with John laying in my lap.  He was so sick and frail with an IV medication as a constant reminder of how sick he really was.  Later when it was time to go to bed he went to his new bed – the recliner.  No longer could he make the trip upstairs, and no longer could he sleep flat.  He couldn’t breathe that way.  So I would take my place on my new bed – the sofa nearby – so that I hear him breathe – or not breathe.  Of course sleep was something neither one of us got often back then.  If we weren’t awake from not feeling well, then we were awake from fear. 

There were times when I found myself getting resentful.  It was like taking care of a child, except that he wasn’t a child.  He was my husband.  He was supposed to be taking care of me.  Not knowing how it really felt to be sick with Cardiomyopathy I would rationalize that he could do more.  For the longest time John hid the extent of his sickness from me.  He pressed on, kept working, to protect me.  I didn’t understand why it seemed that “all of a sudden” he couldn’t do things he used to do.  Many nights I went to bed in tears.  The days became one like a tunnel where I could see the light at the end, but the outside was blurry – a blurr that seemed to never clear.  I told my friends I could not do it another day.

Those were the moments that I remembered my choice.  We did not have a choice of whether or not to go through this experience so early in our marriage, but I did have a choice of how I would respond to it.   

I chose to become a helper.  I picked up my cross (Matthew 16:24-25), and I surrendered.  My only purpose became to serve my husband.  Everything else – my job, our house, my wants, my desires – became second or third or fourth.