What took you so long................

The funeral was finally on Wednesday a final close to a very long chapter. I can attest to the fact that I was filled with dread over the prospect of a funeral, especially, an entire week after his passing.

We or at least I cried intermittently for four days straight. I say "I" as opposed to "We" as I hardly saw my husband cry. It’s not like he didn’t cry and it’s not like he’s perilously holding all his emotions bottled up inside, I know he cried, but not much around us.

To understand this is to understand us. Husband and wife, we’re lucky, we’re like paragraphs in a book flowing from one to the other and for that I am extremely grateful. There has been many a day I’d tried to reach him on his cell phone to merely peer into the goals for that day, only get confronted by a busy signal time after time. When I’d finally give up the, without delay the phone would boisterously shrill and I’d answer only to find out we were both trying to call each other at the same exact time and neither call would go though. It’s happened so many times that we don’t even consider it a coincident any more but rather an interesting connection that only we understand.

So to understand this connection you’d understand that I knew for once my husband had to grieve in his own special way. I knew I needed to leave him alone with his own quiet thoughts in the dark basement as he put together a video montage of baby pictures, and family videos of his brother Troy. I knew as he scanned through each picture recollecting the childhood memories of each bus trip, each Easter and each graduation that he was grieving and shedding tears for a brother so young, but at the same time elated that his brother would now be united with their mother. I knew if he could only communicate with the dead he’d ask his brother "Is mom alright?" and a simple yes would be enough to rejoice a song that would resonate from the rafters.

I was scared that the funeral would put us both back into those days gone past. That it would dredge up emotions that took so long to come forth and churn out. But it wasn’t anything like that and for that I was immensely grateful. The service was entitled a "Going Home Service" and that indeed was where he was going after all he’d been through.

You see Troy was diabetic and was on dialysis, but it wasn’t this that cut his life so short. He had gone into hospital for a routine surgery to replace a shunt and after poor judgment he was sent home too early to an empty house with a visiting nurse scheduled. Visiting being the operative word, when the nurse finally came to change his bandage (a bandage that should have been changed every 24 hours) she found him to be septic and had to call 911 immediately upon her arrival. On his way to the hospital he called his father scared and in shock and stated to his father that he was septic and that he was going to die. That was the last time we heard from Troy our hero.

If only he’d lived closer could we have done something? He lived by himself in upstate NY refusing to move closer to the family, reserved in his beliefs, that medical care he’d receive up there was better than anything he could attain in one of the five boroughs of New York, and I don’t state any of this to cast blame on anyone as blame is a pointless game of life, but he was so intelligent and so hard headed that the two canceled out any chance we had of begging him to come home. He lived a good life, the life he wanted to lead and for that I am proud, he worked to educate others on diabetes and dialysis, he volunteered with diabetic support groups and preached on good health every chance he got.

He’s still our hero, but a hero in another time, in another space now.

During the eulogy his aunt said that his mother would have been waiting at the pearly gates arms open saying "I told you to behave!" and his cousin would have been by her side announcing "What took you so long" and Troy would have said..."I’m here now... so lets rest in peace" – humor for a life lived well.