With this ring...

Dear Charming, 

Today, you took back your wedding rings. I had bought a chain for you to wear your rings because you were between sizes. Having lost weight, you were unable to wear the new ring that I had given you for our anniversary, but were still unable to wear your original wedding ring. The chain had arrived the week of the accident and, if memory serves me, that fateful Wednesday morning had been the first day that you had put them around your neck. They had been handed back to me when I arrived at the ICU, in a little plastic bag along with your ID and credit card.

In a daze, I removed the chain from the bag and placed it around my neck. And there it remained every day since. I couldn't bear to take them off. In times when I was feeling helpless, I would find myself playing with them, slipping them onto my fingers or sliding them up and down on the chain. They were my direct link to you. My lifeline. Connecting me to your heart and to our love. 

Today, you asked me to put them back around your neck. I am happy that you want them with you, and thrilled that now you have that same connection close to you. I hope that when I am not with you, that you find yourself doing the same thing I did, touching them and feeling my love for you. Rings are circles. They have no end. They are the perfect symbol for love. 

Truthfully, now that you have them with you, I feel a little naked. On my way to the store tonight, I reached for them, wanting to feel you with me. I had forgotten they were no longer around my neck. Over the past several weeks, they became a part of me. 

It's hard to leave you at the hospital. A weaker me would have signed you out and brought you home at the first sign of struggle. There are moments when you are so lucid and make so much sense, that if I didn't know better I wouldn't believe there was anything wrong with you. Then you ask me for the keys to your airplane, ask me why Skyler stayed out a bar all night last night, ask me who the green-bearded man is that I've been seeing and tell me that you fired half the staff that morning and I'm brought back into reality. I want you home. I need you home. It had been my intention to stay with you every night now that you are in rehab. But, you get so agitated and demand to go home when I'm there that the nursing staff agrees it's best that I don't. For a couple who had not slept a night apart in 14 years, this has been hell for me. I can't even describe the horror of it all. In the last month and a half, I feel like I've aged ten years. 

They tell me that at this stage of the healing process that you don't have the ability to understand the severity of your injuries or the impairments it has caused and that I have to be the strong one. I find this extremely accurate. After the horror we dealt with when your dad died, if you did understand the severity of it, you'd freak out. There have been a couple moments when you do seem to get it. For the most part, however, the word coma is just that to you; a word. Someday, I hope that you understand why I didn't let you come home the first time you asked to. There is nothing I want more. Handing my trust over to nurses and doctors who know more than I do is difficult when all I want is for you to be home, snuggled up in our bed with me. How I've missed you. I wake up several times a night, my heart aching to be near you. I have to trust that they know what's best and when it will be safe for you. Barring no complications, one more week. One more week and we can be together. And I will never let you go again...

I love you

Snow

"I cannot live without you, and I don’t intend to bloody well try ever again. You are my inspiration, my hope, my whole hope, the oxygen in my blood"

Laurence Olivier to Vivien Leigh, Paris 1945