"I'm angry because you're dying!" ? My husband is counting on miracles
I remember exactly how I opened my e-mail inbox and discovered a list of books Julian had ordered in my name:? The oil-protein diet ?,? The power of thought? and similar. A total of 15 titles, all revolving around one topic: how to cure diseases by natural means. I suddenly felt sick. Because I felt that it meant danger.
It got worse. When I asked him about it, my terminally ill husband told me that he had canceled the operation scheduled for the following day. The diagnosis: stomach cancer, chance of recovery about 75 percent? if you would remove the tumor immediately. But Julian would prefer to have access to an artificial diet in an anthroposophic hospital to gain time and check other options. When I learned all this without first being involved in his decision, my heart was racing. A feeling as if I fell into a bottomless hole. But I still asked as calmly as I could, whether he wanted to rely solely on the power of self-healing? His answer: "I do not know."
"We always made all decisions together, I thought at least"
We were married for three years when Julian got the cancer diagnosis. His life expectancy: about six months. Our daughter was two and a half, I was five months pregnant, and the yoga school, which we had opened together in Berlin a year earlier, was just gaining momentum. Our vision has always been a life of two, we always made all decisions together? At least, I thought. There was always that inner connection between us that did not need many words. When he was diagnosed, our relationship changed from one moment to the next. The fact that my modern man, who was never susceptible to hocus-pocus and herbal magic, suddenly believed uncritically hypocritical promises of salvation and did not tell me about them made me stunned. As a parent, you have a responsibility that abolishes self-determination, I think. How could he think of himself and not at least his daughter and unborn baby?
Maybe that's the hardest thing to endure for me in all the misfortune: that my mind suddenly stopped playing in his decision-making. I wanted to balance the options with him, to be by his side. Helping him endure, at the age of 35, has been given the choice to only have a chance of survival if several organs are removed, including one part of the stomach. But he did not respond to my questions and allegations. He had decided to make the disease with himself.
"Despite everything: I stood by him"
It was just over a year between the diagnosis and his death. A time when I watched my husband die. And wavering between powerlessness, grief, anger and despair. It upset me when he preferred a naturopath to an oncologist. When he told me that, I wanted to yell at him. But it's hard to shout at someone who looks death in the eye and is as fragile as a child. I tried negotiating: "If you lost 20 pounds, you go to the doctor." Or: "If I accompany you to the naturopath, you will also be examined by a doctor." I defended him from others, his family and friends because I wanted to back him up. But at home, we quarreled: "That's Russian roulette, what you do."
It changed: nothing. He remained rigid and also turned to bizarre methods. When he wanted to get rid of the tumor with a thought force from a Spanish healer, I came to my limits. "Maybe I'm on the miracle brake, but how is it going to remove something physical mentally?" I yelled at him. Nevertheless, I accompanied him. Also to the doctor who told him that the cancer was a matter of the head? and he just wants to get well.
"Maybe he was actually one of those who had some kind of miracle healing?"
Julian pretended that he had all the time in the world. And I somehow worked? at least to the outside. I took care of our now three-year-old daughter, went to the prenatal examinations, worked in our yoga studio, negotiated with the health insurance. Organized a move because we could not afford the house anymore. I tried to keep everything normal, while Julian became less and less and I barely reached him. And then, when I was about to give up, because I lacked the strength and I did not know how to do all this, suddenly there was our old bond again. Somehow he brought me back inside his inner circle. My anger gave way to compassion and the irrational hope that everything would be fine if I trusted him. Maybe he was actually one of those who had some kind of miracle healing? If he made a clear decision, even if I saw it critically, it meant at least that he wanted to live and not give up.Maybe he had some kind of inner assurance that he would beat the disease? I realized that it made me calmer and helped me endure the reality better when I believed in a miracle. It was like a comforting patch that I occasionally stuck to my open wound.
Months later, after moments of hope and many attempts with alternative healing methods, Julian's decision was taken. His skin turned yellow? a sign that the tumor in the stomach slightly pushed off. My husband was hospitalized and emergency surgery. But the chance for healing was lost. It was too late.
I sometimes wonder today if I should have behaved differently. Should I have had a clearer position on the operation? I did not know myself what was best. Should I have been tougher and tell him: "If you go your own way and do not talk to me, I'll go." May one abandon his dying husband? A yoga student spoke to me then and said that she no longer comes in his class, she does not want to continue to watch him as he kills himself. She was the only one who opposed him. I could not do it. He was too ill.
Looking back, there were moments from the beginning when fate could have taken a different path. When Julian first went to the doctor because of his weight loss and left the stomach acid blockers prescribed for him in the drawer. Or weeks later, when he did not want anesthesia in the stomach and then vomited because the stomach was already closed. The doctor had to stop and sent him home angry. Why did he accept that he lost kilos by kilos? Why did he ignore the doctors' warning that medically there was nothing to weigh? Did he really think his path would lead to recovery? Or was he scared?
"We sang another song and held each other's hands, then stopped breathing."
The last months before his death, I remember only in fragments: how I gave birth to our second daughter at home with the aid of a midwife, while resting in the study next door. How we married ecclesiastically because he wanted that, and his father at the words - until death parted you? cried. How he lay on his bed at home, in the few waking moments. How we said goodbye to each other in the hospice, where he spent the last few weeks and we visited him every day. We sang another song and held each other's hands, then stopped breathing.
At his funeral, in front of his empty grave, the anger suddenly boiled up in me with full force. I saw this dark hole in the ground and thought, "That's all you're leaving me? a hole! And two kids you wanted, a yoga school you really wanted. I have everything on the cheek, what was your life's dream. And now you're letting me down.? I peppered the rose in his grave and went away.
From time to time I try to understand him from time to time. It was Julian's way to be treated at a late age conventional medicine. And I do not know now, four years after his death, whether he has regretted it or whether he found his way right in the end. He never told me, not answering my questions until the very end. I could only watch him die away under my fingers. I could not save him.
