Change of Plans

I visited Shelly today and yesterday. Everything still feels like one bad horrible nightmare. It still just doesn't feel like it's really happening. It's so hard to look at her, she was always this bubbly beautiful woman with glasses, curly hair and a huge smile that could light up the sky. Now she looks so old, no hair, since she's blind she doesn't need her glasses anymore, she's so thin and frail, her smile is small and weak but it's still there.

I sat last night and let myself cry over all the things that we had planned to do or not do that won't or can't happen now. I laughed over the fact that we had said years ago that we'd never be minivan moms, we'd only drive SUV's and then we both wound up getting minivans anyway. I cried over the fact that she will never get to see our daughters both dressed as Tinkerbell this Halloween which we had talked about over the phone when she was in isolation. Her one hundred days of isolation after her bone marrow transplant was to be up right before Halloween so she was really looking forward to Trick or Treating with the kids and see our kids together which we tried to do every Halloween. I cried over the fact that we had been so happy that our my youngest two and her two were so close in age and would grow up together, and now she won't see that happen. I cried over how much she was looking forward to taking her kids to Disney next year and now that won't happen. There is so much more.

Today is my birthday and on some level I cringed every time someone said, "Happy Birthday!" because I felt so guilty that I get to celebrate one more birthday when she won't. How can I be happy at a time like this? This is just not how things were supposed to work out at all. I keep feeling like tomorrow I will wake up and things will be back to normal, Shelly will be fine, no cancer, and this will have all been one big, bad, horrible, nightmare.