Suddenly, the full force and mystery of life are on Carol, a shy, family centered farm wife who refers to her husband as My Farmer/

Never once in their 47 years of life together did she imagine that she would have to be the strong one and do God’s work  while he lay helpless and dying on a hospital bed in their farmhouse.

She is not a farmer or farmer’s wife any longer, she is in another land,  grappling with a process that is powerful and terrifying and  until just a few  weeks ago, unimaginable. Ed, her husband of all those years, is a powerful, opinionated and  dominating man.

Ed has strong ideas about everything, and expressed them with great feeling. I know how much Carol loved Ed, but I don’t think she would disagree with the idea that he was not always an easy person to live with.

While they shared decisions and talked about them, Ed’s larger than life persona loomed over Carol, who was usually content to walk in the shadow of her farmer. Ed was never shy, he cast a big shadow.

That reality of nearly half-a-century of life for Carol has been upended, and this quiet and self-effacing person has been thrown into the whirlwind, there is nothing familiar or safe there for her.

When I told her that she was strong and brave and handling Ed’s devastating brain cancer beautifully, she looked at me as if I had suddenly turned into a frog. “I’m just trying to do right,” she said.

And then she looked so sad.

“My farmer’s bright blue eyes are turning gray,” she said.

Carol is in the center of one of life’s most difficult and complex happenings,  a whirlpool, a tornado, a tsunami of emotion: the impending death of a love one whose care is almost entirely in her hands.

This is the place she never ever  wanted to be. Big shoes to fill. Ed lives in the shadows now, in the mystical place between life and death. Carol is his caregiver, and spirit guide.

She is by no means alone, her loving family is all around her, yet she is alone in the most profound way, and has more power and responsibility than she ever wanted to have.

She must decide in the coming days and  weeks and possibly months just how much she will let Ed suffer, how hard she should work to keep him alive, how difficult it is for her to grasp the mind of a man she lived with all of her life, but who, in many ways, is already gone.

Day by day, she watches the man she loves melt away.

Hospice does not kill people, Ed’s brain cancer will do that.

Hospice will make him comfortable and free of pain and permit him to leave the world when he and his body is ready. At some point, it will come down to how much he is suffering, and whether or not  Carol and her family are prepared to let him go. There are many decisions on that path.

How much to press him to eat? How much medicine to give him? What to tell  him?  How much morphine to ease his pain?

She doesn’t want it, any of it. But there it is, she has it.

Carol sits at the center of this awful storm. Everyone around her is strong, big,  with strong opinions and great big hearts full of passion. Sometimes she seems to be a pale flower in the midst of this riotous clan.

Yet the writer inside of her has emerged with great power and feeling.  Several years ago, Carol never even heard of a blog. Now, she writes every day on her Bejosh Farm Journal, something she and Ed did together, but which is hers to do now. She has courageously told the story of her and Ed and the thing that has shattered their lives together every day, no matter how painful.

Sometimes I think this has saved her, given her voice.

One day at a time, I told her, she will reach clarity on all this when she is ready, and not until she is ready.

She is smart and strong and misses absolutely nothing. She is everyone’s farmer now, gathering her strength, making her decisions, doing the unthinkable, saying the unspeakable. stepping out of the shadows.

She doesn’t want it.

Still, it is happening, I see it every day. Carol grows stronger by the hour, she even seems taller and bigger than she used to be. Her inner spirits and persona are emerging, almost despite herself.

She has some hard decisions to make, it is not appropriate for me to talk about them here, but sometimes it seems the weight of this might crush her.

But it doesn’t.

Today, she decided to go to a county fair tomorrow, Tuesday,  to see her granddaughter show one of the big and beautiful Bejosh Farm cows and to see some of the farm people she has known for years.

A week ago, she would never have left Ed in the farmhouse for four hours on a Tuesday afternoon.

She is slowly asserting her own right to live a bit, to step out of her nightmare and into the light. If it is hard to die, it is perhaps as difficult to watch someone die that you love.

Carol asked me if I could sit with Ed for the four or five hours that she is gone. If Maria gets clear of her work, she may come and join me.

I could see in Carol’s eyes that she wants to go, needs to go.

Tomorrow, she’ll remind me where the medicines and syringes are, and I will keep a close eye on him. I’m a hospice volunteer again.

I said I would be happy to sit with Ed, and I am.

The Ed I knew is gone, and the Ed lying in the farmhouse is a shadow of Ed, he is gathering himself to leave the world, he is sleeping almost all of the time, he is unable to stay awake for more than a few minutes.

It is great that Carol is stepping out for a few hours to support her granddaughter, it will be so good for her. She listened to her children when they told her she should go.

I am grateful to spend some quiet time with Ed, we manage to talk to one another even as he slips away. I’m pleased she trusts me to do it.

Everyone is talking the truth to him now, he knows where he is going.

A hospice nurse told him it would be all right, we would all take care of him, and he would soon be in a quiet and peaceful place with all of the animals  he loved so dearly.

Ed listened carefully.

Tonight, a friend is coming over to read the Bible to him. I’m not sure I ever heard Ed mention the Bible.

I am bringing two books and a camera.

Maybe I can sit in the big fluffy chair and nap with him, perhaps we will meet up in the ether and tell each other some lies.