Remembering Peter
I woke up in the middle of the night with my heart pounding as if struggling to escape my rib cage. Boom! Boom! Boom! I sat up in my bed. What was the matter? I struggled to breathe. All day yesterday, a Sunday, it was an effort for me to do anything. I stayed in my robe and nightgown. I shivered and I shook. I wrapped myself tightly with a blanket on top of the winter dressing gown that I had on. I dragged myself to the room next to our bedroom. I switched on the electric heater and huddled into a little ball on the recliner. I dozed on and off. The day dragged into night. Finally night arrived. I had hardly moved all day. I wearily dragged myself into bed. My exhausted body went into a restless sleep. A meager few hours later I was wide awake.
I walked about the room like a caged animal. Suddenly I realized what was the matter with me. We are approaching the eighth anniversary of my Peter’s death. He passed away on a Monday without any warning. June 1st was the day that God took him from us. My memory rushes back to that excruciatingly painful day. I had prepared a Thai salad for dinner that day. We never ate it. I haven’t tasted a Thai salad since. It was the end of the workday when that cursed phone call came. The voice at the other end told me that Peter was in Jamaica Hospital. It was a policeman who called. He offered to take me to him. I thanked him but called Matthew instead. The man did not tell me that Peter would no longer enter the house at the end of a workday, calling, in his sweet melodious voice, “Honey, I’m home!” I would never hear my love’s sweet voice again, except in my head.
While we were still in the hospital, the news of Peter’s passing had somehow spread. I don’t know how, but it did. While I sat holding his lifeless hand and moaning, “Peter, what shall I do? What shall we do?” While Matthew stood frozen with shock and pain in that eerily quiet ward of death, nearby in that same hospital there were families surrounding their loved ones with love and care, while here we were standing by Peter who had suddenly and inexplicably departed his life and was on his way to heaven! How could that be? Didn’t God realize that we still needed to be together? Didn’t He realize how much more we needed to cherish each other? Why? Why? Why? Why did He tear us apart?
Somehow my niece, Renata, heard of Peter’s passing. The two of them had a very special bond with each other. When she heard, she rushed to our home, but we hadn’t come back from the hospital yet. Sobbing, she knocked at random doors on the block. “Are you Shama? Are you Shama?” she asked desperately. But none of them was Shama, for Shama did not live in our neighborhood. I had met Shama through one of our neighbors and we had become close friends. One of our neighbors took Renata in until we arrived. I am thankful for their kindness.
The thought of that whole day is enshrouded in a veil of dull grey unbearable pain. Even to this day my heart feels an excruciating pang when I think of the day when Peter was taken away from us, that dreaded day that my love was viscously torn out of my bosom and out of our lives.
Will I ever get over the loss of him? The first few years I was convinced that Peter would come to fetch me to him. I would patiently sit waiting. I did not know how to live without him. I became a hollow shell pulsating with pain. I did not experience any joy in anything. I only felt an abyss of great loss, which I still do. He did not come. “Your time has not yet come,” he whispered in my head. I shake my head impatiently! I glance out of the window. It is a chilly day just as the day after he passed away. The tree outside the window is lush and green. On the other end of the garden, Peter had planted a tiny butterfly bush. Each day he lovingly smoothed its leaves and pulled out any intruding weed that dared to emerge. Butterflies hovered around it just as they did over his grave in the early summer days when I visited his grave. Near the butterfly bush, he lovingly planted in the garden, butterflies also hover. There now are two seats next to them. I like to sit drinking my tea, read my book and fondly caress the bush as I remember my dear sweet Peter.
Oh Peter, how very much I love you, how very much I miss you, how very much I long for you.