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Aw, Altura.....lookit, this was not that easy a decision but I love you all the more for sharing such a sad thing with me. But don’t you take it to heart that you did the wrong thing.

Here’s the thing....like you I didn’t know he was dying although I suspected. Billy died in April but his breathing issues begin in January. I saw them get worse and worse. He’d already been in the hospital for that awful brain infection and then he had to be home-infused with antibiotics FIVE times a day....this for six months.

The brain infection began as pneumonia and went through his very bad teeth to his brain. So everyone keep your teeth healthy, it’s more important than for looks.

For another couple of years Billy lived okay but he then had to have a bypass for blocked arteries in the groin and this kept him in the hospital for over a month.

Lord he hated the hospital more than anything though I did everything to make it okay for him.

Anyway, when the lungs really started to go, when it got to the point that he could only sit in his chair all day while I fed and tended to him, when I finally called his doctor (who is also MY doctor) that he finally shouted to all would listen and with last remaining breaths that he did not want to go to the hospital, that he wanted to die at home.

I spoke to the doctor and was told that even if I took him to the hospital he probably only had a couple of weeks left to live.

So that Sunday night he sat down and talked with his mother in Mass. as he did every Sunday night. HE spent the day getting strong because he didn’t want her to know he was dying.

That following Monday I took care of him and had the medical people on the phone. They were wonderful, talking me down because as much as I’d like to say I was brave, there were times I hyperventilated with my fear and terror.

On that Tuesday night it was bed time and I lay down next to him because by then he didn’t even know who I was, thought I was his mother. I prayed to God and even, yon reader should smile, called up my daughter, who then lived in Baltimore, and told her that I was not a good enough person to do this, that I was losing my mind.

“Mom, you’re a good person; you can do this,” she said and that night I went to bed and told God if Billy was still alive tomorrow that I would take him to the hospital, that I was not capable of another minute.

At 5 am the next morning I found him dead, sitting on the toilet no less.

As a post script, that same daughter who coaxed me through this in a manner of speaking got on the radio and told all of Sussex county that I killed my husband, that she was on the phone with me when I did it.

This is all true, not fiction.

Anyway.....I was ready Altura.....I would NOT have lasted another day. God helped me on that one I think.