I have had enough today. I don’t want to write about cancer. I don’t want to write about charities and how they spend their money. I don’t want to write about the latest research or the latest conference on NET/CS.

I most certainly should–but do not want to–write about the cancer fraud case at Duke that aired on 60 Minutes last night.

I’ve had enough of the business of cancer. I’ve had enough of writing every day. I’ve had enough of reading every day. I’ve had enough of analyzing and thinking every day.

I want my wife back and I want my life back.

But it isn’t going to happen.

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. It will be fourteen months and four days since my wife died–since she took her last breath in my arms. It will be fifteen months and one day since the last night we slept together in this house.

Today I went to my voice therapy session. Then I went down the road and bought some craft supplies so I could build a decoration for her grave. I finished it just a few minutes ago. She’d like it, I think.

Tonight, after my ACS meeting, I will write her a Valentine’s Day card. I will finish her poem. I will place them in a clear plastic bag and seal it.

In the morning I will have breakfast, take the pills that are supposed to help lower my cholesterol and keep my heart healthy. I will pack the card, the poem and the decoration into my car. I will drive to the cemetery. I will place them on her grave.

I will stand there in the cold and talk to the stone. It is a ritual that keeps me sane on these emotional days. It gives me an anchor for my grief. I can cry there and no one will notice or care or ask for an explanation.

Then I will come home. I will do the research, the thinking and analyzing, the writing. I will go out and sell t-shirts and buttons. I will tell people I am doing OK–that I have good days and bad days–that today…is whatever it is.

Part of me doesn’t want to do any of this anymore. Part of me wants to curl up in a ball and hide from the world.

But I won’t do that. Maybe I am foolish or egotistical for thinking this, but somewhere out there is a young couple–and one of them has this awful disease and does not know it yet.  Maybe, just maybe, what I write and what I do will make a difference in their lives. Maybe they will not go through in their 50s what Jane and I went through in ours.

Maybe one of them won’t have to make the weekly trek to the cemetery–or the really tough ones on those days that every couple has that are special.

And maybe one of them won’t have to sleep in an empty bed that has a spot in it that never quite gets warm the way it once did.