A Book Must Close

Bittersweet time together...I had missed him so very much. My family was shocked and annoyed to see him there. I had promised them this was over, but here we were again. Danny was pretty well-behaved, but moody, and I basically just went along with irrational comments and behavior in order to keep things smooth. A voice in my head was screaming louder and louder how wrong this was. Dangerous actually. But I was still clinging to the now destroyed idea that my love for him could make a difference...bring some great change. I knew the reality, but I wasn't ready to accept it. Lying in bed that night, I kept thinking that this was our last one...I laid my head on his chest and listened to his heart all night. I never slept. In the morning, which was Sunday, his mom called to tell him he could stay one more night and Danny's uncle would take them home Monday morning. I remember wondering why I wasn't being given any choice in this. I text his sister, who told me she had told her mom that this was a real bad idea and that her mom had said she "didn't care" 

I was starting to realize other things as well...mine and Danny's relationship wasn't a normal healthy one even before his accident. Oh I loved him to death, but I barely coped with his personality flaws and dysfunctions a lot of the time. With the memory loss and no sense of time passage or sequencing, it was worse. I'd been laid off from my job for months, but he accused me of saying I went to work but went out with other guys. I couldn't go to the store without being called half a dozen times and/or questioned of my where-abouts. The wives of the brain-injured I talked to were going through the same things, and it was I suppose "easier" for me to blame all his behaviors on brain injury, but in all honesty, these were things I had dealt with all along and which were improving with medication before the crash. And at night before falling asleep...he talked crazy...at times psychotically. I knew I was entering the final chapter of a book that must close.