.... I usually worked side by side with him on anything he did.
But this day, I drove two miles west to the local grocery and got the cottage cheese and a few other items. I had gone a bit early because I never went out and about town that I wasn't stopped for conversation. I also dropped a few more of his letters off at the post office and headed back west. I was about a thousand yards from the shop when he was blown into the telephone pole that was in front of the shop.
The shock of that sight for me was so great that I never remember hearing the sound of the blast, or feeling the concussion from it. Only marked with that sight of my husband's death, as the sealed barrel he touched with a welding rod when trying to pull himself up, blew up on him with a force that rattled windows a mile away according to others later. Later, I learned that water poured out of two barrels had run under the 4 x 8 plyboard and was forced slightly uphill when he stepped on it to ground the third hot and now lethal barrel. He never saw this from beneath his welding helmet. I am sure he never knew what hit him.
I can still describe every stop-frame image, memory and emotion I felt then. I had them in vivid flashbacks for a year afterwards, so like what he had suffered in flashbacks from Vietnam I suppose. I pulled into my shop parking lot and ran to him. So did hundreds of others as traffic came to a halt. A paramedic was by his side in seconds. Friends and neighbors and community members and perfect strangers were all around us as the paramedic tried to revive him. My husband and I had both taken emergency medical technician and life saving courses. I started assessing the situation. The barrel was 25 feet away, the impression of his welding helmet in the lid of the barrel beside him. I had seen him hit the telephone pole, and I realized his neck was broken, then found worse.
So I did something that shocked some, but not those who really knew us. I begged the paramedic to let my husband go, be dead as I knew he already was, in peace. The young man didn't know me at the time, but knew of my husband, most everyone in the community did. He wanted to save him. He tried in vain with so many urging him on. People really liked this man they really didn't know, my husband. This man who suffered from PTSD from Vietnam. Most never knew he went there since he was many years older than most Vietnam vets in the area. His last day in Vietnam had been March 23, 1967. It was September 15, 1997, and thirty years since he had been in Vietnam, a place that had held him for so long.
This young man told me I didn't understand. That many people were being saved and did well after major injuries IF he could just revive my husband. He was frantically trying to do just that while juggling a cell phone trying to get an ETA on an ambulance that finally arrived thirty minutes later. I understood and so would have my husband. He had been saved a number of times already in his life. He had also done everything he could in life to save others both physically and mentally. My husband had come full-circle. He had done everything in life he desired at the time and had gone out of it mercifully fast. I knew noting would bring him back from the injuries he had this time. I had seen him suffer a great many injuries in the 28 years I had been with him since he was a very active man. I looked at him and saw no pain in his face, so I could let him go.
There was a bit of confusion on where they would take him, and I was not allowed to ride in the ambulance, so our police chief told me he would find out for me. I asked him to please keep people out of the shop. My husband would have understood what I did next, he had also been a poet. I went inside and began writing to cope, and wrote LOST SOULMATE shortly after the ambulance came for him. It became my first Digest pick on the Blender. "Whose heart is breaking here, as your eyes meet mine, and lips form my name just before you turn away, Angels watch and weep, the earth wobbles on its axel."