Indeed, I am back after a 6-month hiatus, but my creative mind is still not fully with me. I feel empty, lost, alone, shocked, and bewildered after loosing my beloved and most cherished wife and intimate friend of 44 years to glioblastoma, grade IV (a very progressive brain tumour/cancer). She was diagnosed in early September 2018 and was on heavenly abode on February 11, 2019. The cancer swallowed her at such an incredible speed that we, as a family, are still mesmerized. I still can’t believe she’s gone and has left me in such a deep and dark hole that I may never be able to come out of it.

But try I must. My very resilient nature won’t allow me to throw-in the towel and accept to live with the past in depression and solitude. I firmly believe that life must move on. Moreover, I console myself by repeatedly uttering the universal truth that of the couple, no two spouses die at the same time – one is always left behind (statistically speaking, it’s mostly the woman as her man dies earlier).

Granted, no one ever will or could fill the vacuum she has left behind, I still have to find the will to live a creative and productive life for my children and grandchildren. And for a writer, what else is there to engage him/her in such a life other than writing itself. I will eventually find my salvation in continuing to write – an activity I dearly loved and lived for while she was around. I think she would be happy to see me pursue my passion.

For those who don’t know me, or are not aware of my love of writing, I humbly invite them to visit my site https://www.rajchawla6.com. You will find three books (two fictions and a non-fiction) released between June 2016-18, besides umpteen analytic papers published while employed at Statistics Canada, Ottawa, Canada. These books can be purchased at https://www.amazon.com/author/paulshona; and for those living in and around Ottawa, these books are available at Ottawa Public Library.

Considering how fast the brain cancer drained my wife’s health, mobility, speech, and memory, making her totally dependent on nurses and orderlies for her day-to-day activities, and how she moved from hospital to hospital (for example, she had brain surgery done at the Ottawa’s Civic campus, her dual therapy of radiation and chemo at the General campus, treatment of brain injury at Ottawa University’s Rehab Center, then back to General campus for maintenance of chemo therapy, and finally for the maintenance care at St. Vincent Hospital – where she eventually died) and was exposed to different caring staff with different personalities and standards of care, I plan to write a book on what she went through including the kind of care and treatments she received from professional doctors, nurses, and orderlies working under our universal Health Care System. As one of the oncologists mentioned at one of our meetings, “The system is not perfect, but still, it’s working.” The book will heavily draw on the daily journal I kept while visiting my wife each and every day for a little over 150 days – come sun shine, rain, snow, sleet, or freezing rain. I didn’t want to miss seeing her beautiful face each day – at least for four hours. There were days when I was with her from 10 – 15 hours. I watched with great sorrow, and horror how my wife, with her extroverted, happy, witty, and socially magnetic personality, slipped away from us all day-by-day.

Moreover, that’s the only way I can communicate and share with public at large my innermost thoughts about how I felt, grieved, and silently cried over my helplessness to pull my wife out of this painful misery.

Hopefully this book should be out in the latter part of 2020 – provided I am still around.

Tags Glioblastoma Public Health Care Spousal death