On that August night so long ago, when the Death Truck arrived in my dream, Tom’s fate was sealed. By then, even as we started making the Youtube videos, it was too late for him to root out his evil genie, except by dying. The secret police had caught him. There was no escape. All he could do was give up all hope and pray for kindness in his last hours. The death truck gave us a year together before it took him. And that turned out to be the most important year of our marriage.

When he was diagnosed with cancer, I fainted in the doctor’s office. We’d been through so much and now a deadly cancer.

But long before he was on heavy pain medication, Tom seemed bemused and sort of enjoying all the attention and care I lavished on him due to his disease. He was rarely frightened or worried. He really was incapable of showing weakness, even when faced with death. His own strength of body and mind was his Achilles heel. A weaker man might have broken down and been forced to deal with his psychological problems long before he got cancer, but not Tom the tank. The only person strong enough to defeat Tom was Tom.

During his illness, he lost the use of his vocal cords, could not speak, could not swallow, had a tracheotomy, which required oxygen at night, suctioning, and he had to be fed through a stomach tube. It was horrible. However, he seemed almost happy and to revel in my constant, round the clock care of him, which he accepted eagerly and with an abundance of warmth, love, and unashamed appreciation of a kind which I’d never previously received from him. I believe his complete physical incapacity freed the good Tom to accept love unashamedly without the secret Tom punishing him for being weak. He was dying. It doesn’t get scarier than that.

Love had to mortally wound him to free the good Tom from the bad Tom. I think this last year was when his soul actually separated into two parts. Once he was so ill that self-sufficiency was impossible, he could at last allow me to take care of him, and accept my love joyfully. With great astonishment, I saw the relief and happiness on his face every day, through every ordeal, as I performed all the nursing chores for him.

He even whispered to me, near the end, that he never knew how much I’d loved him. I was shocked. Had it really taken him thirty-five years to figure that out? No, but it had taken him thirty-five years to accept it.

But it was too late for all that. I still loved him and took care of him because he was and always had been the one man in the world for me. Those memories of our shared daily battles against inevitable death, which crept up on us through cold hospital corridors and long hours in waiting rooms, are unbearably poignant. I will never forget any of those precious moments. All the little things we did to keep our spirits up and all the little kindnesses we bestowed on each other are truly the greatest jewels in my memory of Tom’s love. He was childlike and helpless. It was just tragic. Our hearts truly bonded during that last year as we fought off death together. I believe this was another intervention on the part of the spirit world. That last year sealed the bond between us which has made it possible for our hearts to communicate fairly easily, even though Tom is no longer in this world. I was the one person in life he was actually close to.

I think it is even possible that this strange, last act, bounty of love, that we briefly shared, enabled decent Tom to fully separate from that troubled part of his soul in the afterlife. The death truck gave us one year of love. By chance in the hospital, we were visited by a Catholic nun who performed a marriage service in which we renewed our wedding vows only a few days before Tom lost consciousness forever. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Someone sent her to us, of that, I am sure.

Tom escaped his mental torture. Not to love, but to death. The death coach had patiently waited for him, but it was time for him to leave this world. It’s all so sad. How very maliciously our minds can deceive and destroy us. What a lonely and sad life he was condemned to lead by his own doing. The influence of his mental problems was so powerful that not even all the years of our marriage could persuade him to trust what was right in front of his eyes. His faith in the majesty of God may have been all that gave strength to his loving self in his lifelong battle against the very destructive secret Tom. He was bedeviled all his life.

Tom was everything to me, everything. I loved him madly, deeply, how do I love thee, let me count the ways, night and day you are the one, and I still couldn’t reach him or defeat his past. I couldn’t save him from himself. I couldn’t even get him to tell me the truth so we could try to fix it. I lost him, lost his laughter, his dimples, and those shy blue eyes. He was the whole world to me. But that world had shrunk over the years and become frustrating, grim, and lonely for both of us.

We did make each other better in many ways by being together. I had somebody to love who really needed all my love, and Tom had someone to keep him steady and help him make the most of his many talents. I learned so very much from living with Tom that I could never regret a nano second of our marriage. And Tom’s speaking to me from the afterlife has led me to develop my psychic abilities, which has given me a very strong faith in God. The angel told Tom to believe in the Christ, and I do. I never would have so surely believed in God without Tom coaxing me toward spirituality from the other side.

Long before he made his guilty confession to me, I had a dream visitation from Tom in which he appeared as a giant eagle, like the prow of ship. I couldn't help noticing that this eagle had badly broken pin feathers on one wing. In Allison Dubois's book Into the Dark, she says that "spirit will send you a sign, often a bird if the deceased felt trapped in their broken body in some way before they died, and they want to demonstrate to you their freedom of spirit." I believe the eagle was Tom’s spirit, and the broken pin feathers were his emotional problems, which kept his spirit from soaring freely in this world. I love that spirit in you, Tom, and I always will.