Patti's gone

This has been one tough week.

I lost my wife Patti on November 2, 2009. She died from a combination of things – including the flu.

Just the flu? The A1 flu is new to America. It hit us hard this year and it has taken some people out.

It’s funny (not anything you’d laugh about) how this thing popped up on us. We had a couple hundred people die from it.

It’s easy to catch and a nasty way to go.

Patti got at our grandkids’ birthday party. It was at a kid-spaced restaurant packed with about thirty video games. It was heavy with kids and a bunch of adults.

I ran around it with a new digital camera and shot more than 200 frames. It was fun – even I had a good time. That’s saying something.

Patti was great with kids, even kids she wasn’t related to. They sat on her lap and she played and sang with them. She dumped a ton of bucks just to feed them and play with them on the machines.

A few kids weren’t into it. They sat through it and looked miserable. She spent a great deal of time holding these ones and spent some time trying to make them feel better.

They didn’t. They had the new flu and spread it around.

It took a few days for Patti to get sick. She never bitched about being sick, but this stuff hit her seriously. It was so bad that she asked to hit the hospital.

They put her in a kind of emergency room. It was nasty. They doped her up. They shoved tubes down her throat and did all kinds of other ugly stuff.

I’d been there nearly all of the time. They let me stay in her room the first couple of nights, but I was yanked out after a couple of days. I bitched enough that I got into it part of the days.

I got up around at seven that morning. Jessie, one of her twin daughters, was hanging around outside the room and had been in tears for some time. I talked her into dressing up on a mask and other things to get in the room.

Patti died about half an hour later. A group of doctors and nurses tried to keep her alive but she went pretty quickly. They booted Jessie and I out of the room but she was gone five minutes later.

That in itself was pretty spooky. It was almost like she’d seen us before she was ready to go.

Spookier yet is that I had been at the same place and played with the same group of kids. A lot of people caught it but she was the only one who died from it.

The big difference was that I’d taken a shot for the stuff a week before. They were giving them away for free at a VA hospital entry. They didn’t ask for your ID and they didn’t really care much who you were.

Patti had bitched and nagged at me to take a shot. I gave in. She refused to. She said it was more likely I’d get it, not her.

And she was wrong.

I’ve been through two divorces but neither of the things hit me as hard as this did. It’s changed my life.

It will probably take the system some time to protect most of us from this thing. I hope it doesn’t hit you.

Me? It’s taught me a lot about life.

And death. I’ve died four times and was brought back, but that’s another story for another article.

Probably the most important thing is to appreciate every day you get.

I hope you do…