Life After You; Time Heals All Wounds

Ethan's POV  My name is Ethan Mortison, the only son of Katherine and Elijah Mortison. I'm a doctor and a researcher, and this is my story.  My early life was pretty unremarkable. I was a shy little geek who came from a good family. My childhood was filled with a lot of love and I stayed in one house until I graduated from high school. I had some friends and while I felt lonely a bit, I wasn't an outcast by any metric.  I grew up playing with a few other kids, Seth, Rosa, Anna, and Christopher. From the days of making pillow forts to entering high school we were always together. In 9th grade we kind of went our own ways, keeping some contact but we all fit into different groups.  When we were 16, Rosa and I fell in love. She was an all around amazing woman, great at school, involved in cheer-leading, loved to dance, and held the record for our diving team. I was just a nerdy guy who was still growing into my body, blonde hair and deep blue eyes were some of the only things going for me at the time. Still, she saw beyond my nerdy exterior and looked at me like I had hung the stars from the sky. Our last 2 years at high school were some of the happiest. Rosa motivated me to work hard on myself and to increase the effort that I put into both my body and my schoolwork. Because of her I was set to graduate as valedictorian and had found a lot of great friends within the popular cliques at school. We spent most of our days cuddled up together between classes, our evenings hanging out after she got done with practice, doing our homework together, and our nights on the phone together. If there was ever a couple that would be seen as inseparable it would have been the two of us. Everyone thought that we would have a fairytale ending, that we were meant to be. On her 18th birthday I got down on one knee in front of our entire school and proposed, asking her to be with me for the rest of our lives. The moment that she said yes was the best moment in my life. I was riding on a high and everything was going to be perfect. Little did I know that there was tragedy lurking around the corner.  Rosa had been having some issues for almost a year, bruising easily, having nose bleeds, sleeping a lot, a few memory issues, and some phantom pains. Everyone thought they were because she pushed herself so hard. She was in so many different activities and she rarely slept. It wasn’t until she collapsed at the last game of the year that she was taken in to a doctor. Not that it mattered, in those days there was no treatment for what Rosa had. That was one of the worst nights of my life.  Rosa had a rare and untreatable form of cancer, one that had started in her bones but was now attacking her brain. They gave her 6 months to live, 6 months for us to have the life that we wanted to spend together. She wouldn't last more than 3. This wasn't a situation like A Walk To Remember where we got to get married, where I got to make her life more comfortable. Rosa died alone and scared, surrounded by instruments that she couldn't even name.  After her diagnosis we started to make plans, wanting to be married before she died, hoping to tie ourselves together in this life and the next. I would drive her to all of her appointments and make sure that she took all of her medications. I spent hours each day looking through pages and pages of information, trying to figure out ways to help her. I knew that I was completely out of my depth, but I had to do something to make sure that she would be as comfortable as she could possibly be.  Around 2 months into her illness, she went in for a routine checkup and never ended up leaving the hospital. Her blood work and x-rays showed that her problems were spreading, she was getting sicker. They admitted her hoping to stabilize her, but her numbers never evened out. The first few days she was lucid, able to talk with me and c***k jokes.  Slowly that stopped, and she was hooked up to more and more machines. She stopped being able to eat, started to slip in and out of consciousness. The day that we had planned to get married she smiled at me one last time and squeezed my hand. I kissed her and told her it was okay for her to take a nap. She closed her eyes and slipped into a coma.  I stayed by her side for another 2 weeks, hoping that she would wake up one more time, putting her engagement ring on a chain for her when her fingers got too thin. I spent my days talking to her, rubbing her hands, singing, doing everything I could to try and surround her with love. I only left to take small naps and shower, taking all my meals in the room with her. I was sure that I would be there with her. I couldn't give her the wedding that she wanted, but I could give her this at least.  Unfortunately I was asleep when she passed. I went home after waiting for 3 days, checking with the nurses to make sure that there was no change. She was peaceful and looked stable. I slept for 4 hours and was woken by the worst call of life. At 5:30 am she threw a clot and had a stroke, the pressure was too much for her to handle and she died. Alone, in pain, and without seeing her 19th year.  It was that day that I swore I would find a cure, a way to treat people who were going through the same thing that she was. I would spend the rest of my life finding a way to make up for missing the most important moments of hers, and in that moment I promised myself that I would never love again.