Five years on…

It was a chemo day. And because on chemo day my husband was pumped full of steroids and felt pretty good and had plenty of energy, we always went out for lunch. Scampo’s? Toscano’s? One of those places. I can’t remember which one, but they were our two post- chemo spots.

It was a chemo day, so when we got back home after lunch, I took a nap. Jim – all pumped up – didn’t.

He got me up about 3 p.m. to tell me that something had happened at The Marathon. Something bad.

I walked out front, and there was the usual complement of runners walking around, shrouded with their silver warmer-upper-blankets. Were there cops? There must have been. Were there sirens? There must have been. All I remember outside our front door was runners milling around the Public Garden and the Common.

Soon enough we found out what had happened. It was bad. Really bad.

Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the Boston Marathon Bombing.

Here’s what Pink Slip had to say five years ago today. April 16, 2013:

What was, up until 2:50 p.m., a glorious day…

Personally, even at the time I knew it hadn’t really been a glorious day. Not for us. We kinda-sorta already knew that, if this chemo wasn’t last ditch, it was second-to-last-ditch. Which is what it turned out to be. We already knew that Jim’s cancer wasn’t curable. But we hoped for manageable. We hoped for remission.

But Patriots Day is always a glorious day for Boston. The Marathon. Spring. Sox at home…

Only not that day. Not April 15, 2013.

A week on, I had processed my thoughts, and here they are in a rather long post dated April 22, 2013.

That was the week that was…

And a few days later, things were sort of back to normal, and I went to see the Sox play with my dear old wonderful friend Marie, which I wrote about on April 26, 2013.

Home Opener

It was pretty clear by April 2013 that my husband was on borrowed time. Not so with Marie. Her cancer recurrence wasn’t diagnosed until the fall.

But by the end of April 2014, I’d lost them both – Jim in February, Marie in April.

I guess I’m going full-narcissist here and, on a day when I should be thinking about the fifth anniversary of the Bombing, and the death and destruction it rained down on so many, I’m thinking about what was going in my world at that time.

Anyway, I still love Patriots’ Day.

The forecast is for rainy weather, but not call-the-game rainy weather, so I’m heading out to Fenway to watch the Red Sox play the O’s – my home opener for this year. After the game, I’ll watch a few late coming runners finish. Then I may head over to the post-Marathon party at my gym/PT hangout, where the owner and a lot of the patients/gym rats are runners.

But I will also be thinking of those who were killed – Krystle Campbell, Lu Lingzi, Sean Collier, and this little guy, Martin Richard:

Five years on…Those five years sure went fast…