Failure is a word we use too easily sometimes. That came back to me last night as I read an email from someone lamenting that they felt they had somehow failed to live up to others’ expectations–as well as their own.

I have spent a lot of time with that word the last few weeks as I tried to work my way through the latest phase in my ongoing struggle to come to terms with Jane’s death. It started as I began going through our books and papers as I prepared the first room for painting–and has continued through every project since.

The latest blow came as I was clearing off a bookcase in what was Jane’s craft room. I came across a clipping from the fall of 2008. The subject was what to do, legally, after someone dies. She had folded it up neatly and placed it on the shelf where  she had to know I eventually would find it.

I scanned through it and realized I had hit everything on it–then set it carefully aside, as I do with all of the messages she seems to have left for me. Then it struck me: that clipping was a full year older than her battle with the H1N1 flu–18 months older than the beginning of the problem with her breathing and her legs.

Did she know even then she was dying? Should I have pushed her harder about seeing doctors? Did I fail to see something I should have? Not that I did not get her to go to her primary care physician–but should I have pressed her harder about seeing a specialist–about getting a second opinion?

The logical part of my mind knows I did all I could. But the emotional side keeps telling me I failed her.

Then there are my failures when we had a diagnosis. I did all the things they tell you to do–to be positive and upbeat, to visualize her getting better; I chanted, I prayed. I stayed strong for her every minute of every day. When she got angry over how long her recovery was taking, I did everything I could to buck her up.

Twice she went into a coma. Twice they told me she had a fighting chance. Twice I let them call her back from the edge of death. Part of me sees my decision to call her back as a failure–that I should have let her go the very first time.

But we all thought she had a fighting chance–and the decisions I made I made based on the best information I had at the time.

It is all any of us can ever do. Sometimes our decisions lead to success. Sometimes they lead to something else. Success makes us feel good–failure forces us to think and to learn. Sometimes failure is more important in the long term than success is.

Sometimes failure is the foundation success is built on.

But it stings all the same.