For Jules, with love and gratitude.

Peter Jones
3 min readFeb 9, 2021

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For all the restless nights and sleepless mornings.
For all the endless patient hours in hospital rooms.
For waiting and worrying and staying as long as it takes.
For paying careful attention to instructions I was too tired to remember.
For consulting doctors and nurses, administrators and staff.

For the pre-surgery cleansing and the post-surgery sponge baths.
For the back rubs and the foot rubs and the shoulder rubs too.

For driving me anywhere, no matter the hour, and dropping me off at the door while you go park the car.

For pushing me to eat when I really didn’t want to eat.
For pushing me to exercise when I really didn’t want to exercise.
For a million nourishing meals that you planned and prepared and presented with style and grace (and for the dishes that magically washed themselves).

For baking us bread and juicing us juice.
For making little afternoon pick-me-up smoothies.

For listening patiently when it was hard to be patient.
For speaking quietly when you wanted to scream.
For letting me fall apart and cry a few times.
For not letting me fall apart and cry too many times.

For making me feel sexy when I was not feeling sexy.
For making me feel better when things were getting worse.
For not caring one damn bit that I was bald.

For all of the jokes. Well… maybe not all of the jokes.
For most of the jokes.

For keeping your sense of humor intact.

For weekend hikes in the Hudson Valley and date nights in the city.
For surprise parties and social engagements only you could have planned.
For Sunday morning breakfasts and coffee by the waterfront.
For old movies on the couch and reading together in bed.
For always finding creative ways for us to have some fun together.

For all the many times you passed on fun-sounding plans with your friends and probably didn’t even mention it to me.

For knowing when to wake me and when to let me sleep.
For drawing me wonderfully hot soothing baths.
For moisturizing and grooming and manicuring (sometimes me, sometimes the dog, usually both).
For knowing when I needed therapy, when I needed sympathy and when I needed a swift kick in the ass.

For the discounts and the refunds and the upgrades and the benefits.
For the appointments you scheduled and then re-scheduled and then cancelled or changed.
For all the goddamn insurance paperwork and all of the goddamn bills.
For calling my family to update them, no matter how busy, no matter how tired, no matter how late.
For honoring your vows, even though you got screwed on the whole “in-sickness-or-in-health” clause.

For not panicking.

For reminding me to stop and breathe and calm the fuck down.
For occasionally, privately, giving yourself just one minute to cry before pulling it together and figuring out what to do next.

For always knowing what to do next.

For generally elevating our quality of life during the most depressing, enraging, anxiety-inducing year imaginable.
For doing all of these things knowing you will never be repaid.
For not needing to be repaid and doing them anyway.

At the end of the day I give back what I can, little by little, knowing it will never be quite enough.

But the will to live is strong. The fight to survive, to keep on pushing, to stay alive as long as it takes.

Long enough for the chance to make us even.

Love,
Pete

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Peter Jones
Peter Jones

Written by Peter Jones

“Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.” — Chinese Proverb

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