A year ago today I lost my husband.

That sounds so twee to me, ‘lost my husband,’ as if he were missing. My husband died. He was in a nursing home because he never really recovered after the second craniotomy to get rid of a pernicious glioblastoma. I thought he was making progress. I thought he would be coming home soon and we’d face whatever came next together, at home. I thought he’d become well enough for the next clinical trial.

I left him on that Sunday afternoon, told him I would be going to the grocery store, making dinner for myself, and that I could come back that night if he wanted me to. Looking back on it now, I know that he was depressed because his answer was “why would you want to do that?” I got home, put my phone on to charge, and almost immediately got a phone call from the nurse—he had coded while trying to eat his dinner. They weren’t sure why, but paramedics were working on him. I dropped everything and dashed back to the nursing home, where a kind nurse took me into another room to avoid the EMTs. I didn’t even have my phone, it was back home on the charger.

By the time the EMTs moved him to the ambulance, in preparation to taking him to the hospital, I managed to grab his phone and did another mad dash to the hospital. Because I volunteer at the hospital in the emergency department, I knew it was bad when they sent a tech out to me and guided me to the family room. I was in a panic, in deep denial, trying hard to keep from screaming.

They finally came and got me. The PA who had been attending him was sympathetic but honest; it didn’t look so good. They had been performing CPR on him for more than 40 minutes but his heart stubbornly refused to start beating by itself. She led me to room 16, which was crowded with techs, doctors and EMTs. They had a LUCAS device on him and he was intubated. As I came in, one of the EMTs grabbed me in a bear hug, holding me tightly, letting me sob into his jacket. They turned off the LUCAS and I begged his heart to start beating again, but it was not to be.

There’s a scene in Return of the King where Samwise thinks that Frodo has been killed by Shelob. He begs Frodo, please don’t go where I can’t follow. That was running through my mind as I watched him. He went where I couldn’t follow and I don’t know why.

They let me sit with him in that room for as long as I wanted. I used his phone to call our daughter, who broke land speed records (in her pajamas) to get to our house from Portland. I called his sister, and her scream when I told her he was gone is seared in my memory. I asked her to let the family know. I finally left him in that room and went home—what else was I supposed to do? I called a friend when I got home and she rushed over, cooked for me, because I needed to eat, and watched me carefully until our daughter appeared.

I don’t really remember much of the rest of that horrible day and the days that followed. I know I did things, made decisions, arranged for organ/tissue donation, called a funeral home—but I have no real memory of it.

Gradually, the sharp, agonizing pain receded, and I entered paperwork hell. I had to fight for my rights as his widowed spouse, proving again and again that yes, he was dead and yes, I was his heir. It took almost three months to finalize his Social Security survivor benefits, and nearly that long to get his reduced pension put in my name. It took nearly six months (and intervention from Senator Elizabeth Warren, bless her) to get his Thrift Savings Plan money dumped into my puny IRA. Everywhere I turned, I had to acknowledge that my beloved husband was dead. It became a drumbeat in my head every night when I tried to go to sleep.

We held his memorial on what would have been his 68^th birthday, February 1^st. It was well-attended, with friends and his whole family coming. In the spring, we took his ashes to a nearby park and placed them around the root ball of a red maple sapling, planted in his name, with a plaque that had his name and his favorite quote from the movie Galaxy Quest.

Our daughter moved in with me, taking over the loft area of our house, which was really too big for just me. Thanks to my husband’s sharp investing, I’m fairly well-off and can afford to keep the house and even go on vacation every now and then.

But I’d give it all up to have just another year with him.