One year ago today Rachel and I left our home in Arlington Virginia to go to Southampton on Long Island to house sit for Ray and Tara while they were away on vacation. Lucky us. The book I am reading in the top photo is a memoir by Willie Morris about his friend James Jones. It is titled "A FRIENDSHIP".
Willie Morris lived in Sagaponack back in the 1970s and so did James Jones.
I had no way of knowing how special this vacation for us would become. Along with her 3 weeks in the South of France in September with her C&O Canal friends and their World Canal Conference these were some of her last really good days.
We did go to Sanibel Island in Jan. 2014 as we always did for the last 15 years but she was suddenly much sicker then. Still we had no idea how bad it really was. Not until we got back to Va. and she went in the Northern Va. Hospital in Arlington, Va and had the biopsy on Feb. 10th and we got the results on Feb. 13 that it was mesothelioma. A deadly fatal lung cancer caused by exposure to asbestos which could have occurred 30 or 40 years ago.
They told us she might live 3 to 6 months. That was very wrong. She died on March 8th, 2014. Only 18 days after we left the hospital. It was like losing her in a car wreck or train wreck or airplane crash.
It was too sudden. And too terrible.
So I want to post some photos from one year ago August 2013. A far happier time. She was ill but we did not know just how ill. I later said we had been living in a fool's paradise. I meant we thought she would live along time with what she had been diagnosed in Feb. 2013 as having(pulmonary fibrosis).
We never heard the word mesothelioma or lung cancer until Feb.13th 2014. It was a heart breaking diagnosis.
