It's so hard to know how personal to get on a knitting blog. It's all out there, from "I knitted X rows of Y pattern today" (yawn) to "Let me tell you lots of details about my last gyno exam and/or why I hate my husband!" way too much information. And I've walked the line and crossed it at times, but sometimes something I see on another blog resonates with me and I think it's the right time to pass it along.

Amie posted a story about heaven on her blog. Go read it, I'll wait.


Back? Okay. This story resonated with me so strongly because at just about this time last year I was going through one of the strangest, hardest and most life-changing experiences I've ever had or probably ever will have, and this ties to it. I sat for weeks with my husband while he had, for lack of a better way of putting it, one foot in this world and one in the next. He could speak at times, he even made perfect sense for a few seconds here and there, and then he "left" and was still awake but somewhere else, someplace a whole lot more interesting. I could see it in his face, and hear it in his responses to the people he was talking to. His mother was definitely there - and it was comical, because I knew it was her from his responses - she never let anyone get a word in, and sure enough, his conversations with here were one-sided, "Uh-huh, okay, yes, Uh-huh!" and once, a vehement "Well, we'll do something about that!" I tried to "interrupt" the conversation and he actually responded to me with one impatient word, the name of the person. The subject of the conversation was a relative who was on the wrong path in life. Issues that had come up after my husband's condition had deteriorated, that were never discussed around him. I knew because his sister had talked to me. He had been out of the loop for a year. Saying I had goosebumps was an understatement - first, after decades of familiarity I KNEW who he was talking to from his responses, and the end of the conversation I heard was as normal as a telephone conversation. Yet, he had almost completely stopped responding to me, the nurses, or his best friend by this point, we were not part of his world anymore.

And the tie to Amie's blog - I know for a fact that dogs go to heaven, because our old golden retriever came to get him. Our wonderful dog, who had died 5 years ago, apparently was in the room keeping him company, because when I managed to get his attention and ask him who he was talking to, he responded (again, impatiently, because I was bugging him a bit) "The dog!" (by name) he even gestured to where the dog was.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've read the research and know all about random misfires of the dying brain. Maybe that's what it was. If that's all it was, it was an extraordinarily lucid and logical and consistent series of "random synapse firings" from someone with massive brain tumors on a steady morphine drip that would knock out a small town, who could barely swallow food and couldn't communicate with the rest of us. And all I can say on that subject is that doctors who record these "brain events" don't have the perspective of someone who knows the subject so well and yet who is pathetically unimaginative and legally-minded. Put me on the witness stand, I'll take a polygraph - I know what I saw. So I have no trouble at all with Amie's shared story about heaven - I'm pretty sure that's just how it works.

I came out of this endless nightmare a changed person, and not just because of this. I'll share a bit more someday, when I'm ready.