I joked in an earlier post that a photo of me on the tea cup ride at Disney was my October self portrait. Yes, indeed, October 2011 will always be remembered as the glorious month of all things Disney, but it also held a very rare opportunity to be reunited with an old friend who represents a very huge part of myself; the part of me that was once a young widow. (Wow, after bringing up Disney, talking about my time as a widow sounds like such a Debbie Downer downgrade in discussion. Hang in there, I promise it will have a good, ok, more upbeat ending then it seems at first glance.)

My self portrait this month takes us all the way back to 2002, when I met Laura. My first husband Andy was fighting Ewing’s Sarcoma, a very rare and aggressive type of bone cancer. Through some of the organizations I was involved with for cancer support, I came into contact with Laura, another girl my same age out in California whose husband was fighting the same rare cancer. Now you have to know that typically people who have Ewing’s Sarcoma are children, so it was pretty rare to meet another adult who has it, let alone another newly married couple our same age.

Laura called me one day to connect and from that first phone call, we had such an ease to our conversation, such an unspoken knowing that tied our lives together. I tried so hard to live normally amongst the healthy lives of my peers at the time. They were building houses, getting married, having babies and as much as they tried to be supportive of me, nobody knew my pain or my struggles like the women I met who were walking alongside cancer with their husbands. Actually, we weren’t even just walking alongside them. We were right there in the battle zones with them, feeling their pain, nausea, fatigue and of course, the heartbreak and fear cancer brings.

Laura and I never met each other’s husbands. She lost her precious Daniel in April of 2003 and then as Andy and I prepared for hospice, she paved the way for us over phone calls as we neared his death later that July. I remember asking her, “How will I ever let them pull a sheet over my husband’s body and let them take him away? I just don’t think I could ever walk away from him.” Her answer was one that no one in my life could have given me at the time because she had just done it herself. She said, “Betsy, it won’t be him anymore. You’ll know his spirit isn’t in that body and it will be ok.”

As the weeks passed, I didn’t think much about what she said. I was focused on fighting. As Andy let go more and more, I held on stronger and stronger. I pushed him to get more blood transfusions, my family scrambled to find alternative cures and as he said goodbye to his world, I desperately clung to every minute with him. As much as Andy was at peace and ready, my heart was a caged animal wanting so much to fight for this man while everyone was just talking about letting go and allowing his body to just naturally shut down. (He was in hospice, so we were all supposed to be embracing death. To me, it was maddening.)

His body was shutting down in ways that shocked me and horrified those of us that were in his inner circle. During the late stage of his illness, to people who hadn’t seen him in years, he was unrecognizable, but I knew he was still in there. I put a large photo of him before cancer next to his bed and when the nurses would come in to treat him I would say, “This is Andy. He’s a brilliant architect.” I needed everyone who touched him to know that he was still in there. There was still a vivacious person inside that broken body.

After fighting alongside him and trying so hard to keep his body alive, when he finally took his last breath, I truly did feel his spirit leave. Andy was no longer in the wrecked body that lay before me. Just as Laura had told me, I was able to walk out of the hospice room and away from the body I had fought so hard to keep Andy alive in. I remember standing in the doorway of his room at hospice, remembering Laura’s words and saying to myself, “That’s not my Andy. He isn’t here anymore.” I’ll never forget how she helped me prepare for one of the hardest moments of my life I never fathomed I’d be able to do.

After Andy passed, she called me and said I needed to come visit her in California. So only three weeks after Andy passed away, I went. I was a zombie walking through the airport, but her friendship and the unspoken knowing we shared shone like a beacon and I found my way to her. Time with her was exactly what I needed. We talked and talked and talked and looked at pictures, watched videos of each other’s husband’s and best of all, we laughed. Oh we laughed about the most inappropriate things but I can still feel the way that laughter echoed through my body like a shout in the deepest, darkest cave on earth. We went to Napa Valley and I got to drink wine and shop amongst people who didn’t know we were widows and just BE for a bit. Therapy in the finest form.

Of course there was so much more work left to do when I went back home. We both had years and years worth of grieving, sorting and processing left to do. Since then, we have had big lapses in time where we haven’t stayed in touch, but every April and every July we remember each other and the days that we lost our guys and I once again feel that ribbon of support stretching all the way to me from across the country.

This past month I found out she was going to be in my side of the world on business and I got to go have a wonderful long lunch with her and meet her precious husband whom she married a few years ago. Once again, it was like no time had gone by as we started where we had last left off. We had some holes to patch up in stories and so much to tell, but as always, our connection had remained so strong. Laura is such a beautiful and strong woman and so much of a part of my own story of healing. We look like we could be sisters, don’t we? I guess in a way, we really are. (That’s me on the right, btw.)

So this is a part of my portrait of myself in October, 2011: I am, and Laura is too, a woman who loved a beautiful man, lost him and came back a survivor, ready to love again and experience everything that life has to offer with new eyes and a heart expanded more than we ever thought possible.