The Love of my Life

On Halloween, Will and I celebrated the eight year anniversary of the day it suddenly hit us that we were in love. Fortunately, the people we were in love with were each other!

When we first fell for each other, we were both apartment hunting. We started helping each other with apartment leads.... then soon realized we were looking for the same things. Shortly we wanted nothing more than to live together! What a great time that was.

Will and I have been through a lot. Bush and his Axis of Evil have been with us almost the entire length of our relationship! When we met, I was fighting disabling chronic pain and trying not to lose my job and my mind because of it. Will ended up taking care of me almost from the very beginning. I don't really think that's fair.

Will was my voice of reason through a long and complex workers compensation case. He put up with all the people calling the apartment for help when I volunteered for the large chronic pain support group I was a member of. He gave many rides to and from these meetings, helped fix their computers, took us shopping. He helped me figure out ways I could help the people who called crying, whose lives were devistated by their health problems. He helped me find my way out of the darkness that is chronic pain, repetitive strain injuries, chronic fatigue, thoracic outlet syndrome, fibromyalgia, and the stress of getting new diagnoses every few months.

He patiently offered tech and moral support as I stumbled my way through writing a thesis while learning to use voice recognition software. At the same time, construction workers basically gutted and remodeled the building around us... for an entire year. Somewhere along there he was laid off. But again, the silver lining was the friends he had made at that job... who became such an important part of our lives, and enriched it even more.

We have been through several major losses in both our families... but in the process, we've grown closer with each other, with our families and have become parts of each others families. So even through all this painful hardship was growth, growth, growth, and loads of love.

This year we made no big plans for our anniversary and Halloween. It's just as well, as we both ended up with the flu!

Because that Halloween eight years ago is special to us, every Halloween means a lot to us. We try to do something together and often with friends. It's usually a variety of festivities around Halloween, nothing big, lots of little special things.

Since moving to the East coast a few years back, it hasn't been as easy to celebrate. Two years ago at this time, we learned of Will's Mom's illness, and it was only a matter of weeks, we lost her.

So, it is even more important now for us to make the effort, partially in her honor, to greet our trick-or-treaters. We did the bare minimum of decorations, and spelled each other. So we probably gave them all the stomach flu! (Ha, the tables have turned, he he!)

Seriously though.

Will has a heart that just reaches and reaches and reaches. He is the greatest listener. I have learned so much about myself and what a crappy listener I was before I met him. In many ways, he is more patient than anyone I know. Yet because he is, he gets very impatient with impatient people! His Mom used to say he had an overdeveloped sense of justice. That's exactly what makes him so good at what he does... everything.... his brain just wraps around stuff and uses logic and heart to try and do it the best he can.

I know there's more I want to say, but I guess there's only so much ...(and at that point, I accidentally posted this, so I'll add the picture and call it a night! Sometime soon I'll tell the much requested story of how we met.)