She was a woman like one wished a woman to be: warm, loving, understanding, merry, reliant, faithful, caring, a best friend and buddy, and in addition, good-looking too. And we were a happy family. First our son was born, and soon after, we got our first dog, a black Lab mixed puppy with a white chest and folded ears. My wife wasn't used to dogs, so she felt uneasy at first when I brought this bundle home and put it in her lap. But soon the two became inseparable. Twelve years later, when we had to put Susi to sleep, it was as if we had lost a family member. My wife never really overcame the loss. She regularly spoke of 'her' Susi, which was and had remained her favorite, even though we already had our fourth dog.

We had a happy marriage. There were good years and also not-so-great years in between. But no matter how tough times were, we always held together, loved each other, and could always rely on each other. Yet one day my wife discovered a lump in her breast, and although we didn't know it at that time, this was the beginning of the end of our happy times together. After the operation everything looked fine, even though the lump had been rather large. For a few years, my wife did not feel that anything was wrong, but then her bones began to break for no apparent reasons, and we found out that her cancer had spread. There is no need to go into great lengths about her medical history, but the more her condition worsened, the more I fought for her, and the closer we felt to each other. The strange thing is, I loved this woman more than anything on Earth though after seven years of cancer therapy she had become rather incapacitated. She hardly could walk anymore and was almost doing nothing else but dozing all day long. We talked less and less to each other; she was low on blood; she was too exhausted, and she probably was also too sedated from her pain killers. Every time she saw her image in the mirror, her reflection frightened her. This once so good-looking woman now looked like a mummy, like an 80-year-old, and a few months later, one could already see the approaching death in her face.

As I said, we no longer talked much to each other. She was afraid, afraid of dying. She knew that her end was near, yet she avoided talking about it. She avoided the subject because it frightened her; she was afraid of the unknown and afraid of the end. Only once she asked me if we would meet again, and whether Susi would also be in Heaven, but I couldn't give her an answer. Of course we both were raised in Christian families and had learned about Heaven and Hell, of little sins and deathly sins, of the purgatory, absolution and resurrection, of the judgment day and eternal damnation, but when she asked me about Heaven, I couldn't tell her, because for a long time we'd been skeptical about the things the preacher had told us. Later, I heavily blamed myself that I hadn't given her a few hopeful words the one time she ever wanted to talk about the subject, no matter whether I believed in them or not. In her fear of death she certainly only wanted to hear something to draw some hope from. She needed to believe in something, to cling to something, no matter whether sensible or not, and I had missed this opportunity...

Her end came fast and surprising to me, but perhaps I just didn't want to face the facts. She seemed to fall into a deep sleep like a coma and I thought that she may have taken too much morphine but would come out of it. But after she was still unconscious a few hours later, I took her to the hospital. The doctor could instantly see that my wife was dying, and she asked us what we wanted her to do, whether we wanted her to treat my wife or to make her comfortable. I said: "both". My wife was not ready to die, and the doctor gave me an uncertain look. But my sister-in-law, who had come since my wife had wanted to see her sister one last time, also asked for 'treatment', and things started to move in the ward. The blood test showed very low blood sugar levels, and after my wife received a dextrose infusion, she started talking hastily and much clearer than she had during all the weeks before. It was as if she had known that there wasn't much time left. And suddenly she said: "in case something should happen to me, I just wanted you to know that I love you all very much!"

Eventually she was brought back to her room in the hospital and even had a great appetite, but her stomach would not retain food. After some time she again became very tired. It already was seven a.m. and I too felt quite exhausted, so her sister and I drove home. After a few hours of sleep we headed back to the hospital in the afternoon. My wife was no longer as alert and lively as she had been in the morning, and her blood sugar levels were very low again. I was very exhausted, and when her sister kept on talking to her incessantly, I decided that perhaps it would be better to return home. I was feeling overwrought, as one feels when he hasn't had enough sleep for weeks, and by then it already was evening again. And somehow I was strongly convinced that the hospital staff would get her blood levels back in order, and that she would be released from the hospital after two or three days, just as it had happened so many times before.

Shortly after we got home the nurse called, but I was in the bathroom and didn't hear the phone. Then she called again and told me that my wife had called for me, and that she was very restless. I said that we had just been at the hospital and that she should give her a tranquilizer, because my wife often got some during dialysis when I had to leave to run some errands. She had become so dependent that she always panicked when I had to leave her for a short while. Besides, I simply was exhausted. It is not easy to be a care-giver when you are lacking sleep, so sometimes you have to think about yourself, in the patient's best interest, as you need to be back in shape when the patient comes home again.

I was already undressed and had just stuffed down some sandwiches when the phone rang again. The nurse told me that if she were me, she would come immediately, and that she just wanted to let me know, so I couldn't blame her. But I had heard this many times before. I had driven to the hospital on numerous occasions, and every time it was a false alarm. Besides, I was exhausted and hungry, and I didn't want to drive back to the hospital to again spend half the night there. I just was worn out. Nevertheless, I told the nurse that I would come, although it would take me a while until I would be ready and dressed. So I continued eating and got into an argument with my sister-in-law. She couldn't know, but after all the treatments that my wife had received, and the many conversations with her physicians, I believed that I knew my wife's body much better than my own, and my wife could bear a lot, or at least so I thought... Eventually the phone rang again and I was told that my wife no longer had a pulse...

I am describing these events in great detail so that one can understand where my feelings of guilt came from, which eventually made me sick, so sick that the doctor had to prescribe some antidepressants for me. I drove back to the hospital and spent the next several hours alone with my wife. I spoke to her, tried to apologize for not having come right away, and I became more and more desperate. I hoped that she would open up her eyes again, I pleaded to God and kept talking at her, but she didn't move. She still was warm when I touched her cheek, took the ring off her finger and folded her hands. Her mouth was wide open, as if she had tried to gasp for air, and I tried to close it, but it would open up again. So I sat beside her bed, cried, prayed, and told her how wonderful the years with her had been for me, and that she just couldn't leave me now. It was hard to say good-bye. I knew that I could only see her for a short while longer, and for the last time in my life, because we had agreed that her body would be cremated. And so I kept starring at her continuously, I wanted to use every minute left before I had to 'give her away'.

She looked more relaxed than she had throughout the past months, when her face had mirrored the pain she was suffering. And slowly, as I began to dissociate myself from this body, I began to hate it, because I saw the cancer in it, the cancer that had taken my wife from me. By now I had spent four hours with her and I felt torn apart inside. I loved her, and I hated her at the same time. And I felt that I was becoming irrational because I still hoped that she would wake up again, and although my rational side told me that she was dead, I just couldn't accept it. Then she was picked up by hospital staff and taken away.

The next days were hell, and after I was at home all by myself, I felt hit the hardest. The house was overfilled with memories of her. Everywhere I looked, I saw her pills, her clothes, her cup, her bed, her towels; thousands of little items that reminded me of her every single second. It was impossible to avoid these things and to not see them. Two days later I received her ashes. Unlike in Germany, here one can keep the ashes. I placed the urn in the living room, together with a picture of her and a candle beside the urn, and in the evenings I lit the candle, sat on the couch, looked at photo albums and talked to her...

I tried to get a grip on myself again, but my self-accusations got worse and started to eat me up. "Why didn't I drive to the hospital right away? Ok, there had been numerous false alarms, but then I always was there right away, why not this time?" And I envisioned her how she had asked for me, how she had been frightened without me, she just was so helpless, and she trusted me blindly. She knew that I had always been there for her, why not this time? And she certainly had felt death coming and didn't want to die without me being at her side. And perhaps she wanted to tell me something, maybe a last "I love you", or just to hold my hand, which had always protected her. Once I got up, taking the urn with both hands, and I lost control and yelled at it in despair that she should just walk back in through the door, as if it had been nothing but a bad dream, and we'd forget about the whole thing and would never talk about it again...

I could neither eat nor sleep. I lost weight, I felt miserable and sick, and I even briefly thought about killing myself to be with her. But I had promised her that I would take care of our son, who, although already grown-up, still needed a father. And besides, I didn't want to do this to him. Also, what if I would not get to her, what if there was no afterlife, no Heaven, no paradise, what if everything was just simply over, simply over for good? I fell into deep despair...

A few weeks later I went to the doctor. I could not function anymore. Everyone I talked to tried to console me and had warm words for me, but it didn't help. The antidepressant prescribed by the doctor helped fast and well. I pulled some information on the drug from the internet, and now I understand why I got so sick and why one cannot try to fight a depression, which is a chemical imbalance, by just 'trying to control himself'. A body that doesn't produce enough serotonin cannot function normally, regardless of how hard one tries to control one’s self.

When I could think more clearly again, I asked myself what could be the exact reason for my condition, why was I so devastated, and what is it exactly when we mourn. And I asked myself what was different now from a few years ago when my wife spent six months in Germany. At that time I also missed her, but I didn't get sick, I didn't suffer and I had no problems, although I had to live on cans, had to do my own laundry, and had to keep the house clean on my own, just as right now. The answer was simple: back then I did know where she was and that I would see her again. And we stayed in contact, we mailed letters, and made phone calls. Now I didn't know where she was, whether she even existed, or whether her ashes were all that was left of her, besides my memories. And I couldn't call her, although I was so desperate and wanted to apologize for arriving too late, and I wanted to know whether she now was disappointed, whether she still loved me, and whether we still had a relationship, even if there was an afterlife, because our vows said 'till death us do part'. Does this mean that we now were 'divorced'? Was everything over now, just like at the end of a great vacation?

There were only questions and no answers, no healing and no getting over it. Should this keep going on like this? A friend told me that it may take two years until someone can get halfway over it, that there would be setbacks, that one would never really get over it, and that especially men often would never recover completely. Was this supposed to be my future, suffering up to my own end? Perhaps a premature end in grief? I noticed that my neighbors were avoiding me, and I thought of Indian widows, who in former times were burned together with their deceased husbands, because they were already 'dead' while still alive, outcasts, abandoned, isolated, with no one to take care of them, taboo. And I thought of the children’s song, 'Ten Little Indians', "and then there was just one...", and that was the way I felt at that moment...

I hope that my story shows how important it is to provide effective help for the grieving. Support, counseling, grief-aid, whatever we call it - there is not enough help of this kind, and even if a pastor or priest speaks compassionate words, this often is not effective help. Of course one can believe in God, in eternal life, in resurrection, or nothing at all, but all of this just was not enough for me and didn't help me along. I did not want to BELIEVE anything, I wanted to KNOW whether or not there was an afterlife, and I wanted to have some proof. And if there was, I wanted to know where my wife was, whether or not she was disappointed in me, whether she still loved me, and if we still were husband and wife! And what if I had a new relationship? Would I then see my wife again? Or would I have to stay single in order not to lose her forever? Because I didn't have any answers to these questions, and because I wasn't satisfied with warm words of comfort, I decided to get these answers for myself. Thus my pain became the driving force behind my later research.