October2...Gone for Another Year
Been wondering why my sleep patterns and appetite have been disturbed the past couple of days...why I just felt kind of "out of sorts"...and then, today, I realized yesterday was October 2, a more-than-momentous date in my life. Thirty-nine years ago on that day, my thirty-seven-year-old husband died of the leukemia which had overwhelmed his previously healthy body. It had been exactly one month from his diagnosis to his death and to say my entire family was devastated would be understating the effects it had on each and all of us. My children were seven, nine, and eleven and I was only thirty-three. October 2, 1975 became a day which worked its way deep into my psyche, into the innermost parts of who I was and am. Fast-forward nine years to south Florida, with a second marriage and three teenagers and a newly-adopted three- year-old, when I found a lump in my right breast and, on October 2, underwent surgery in Boca Raton. I was only forty-two, had already...