Feeling guilty and ashamed

[feelguilty]

    Before you answer, please try and put yourself, God forbid, in my situation. I am 47 years old and my wife of 21 years is 44. She was diagnosed almost 2 years ago with the same brain tumor that Ted Kennedy has. The prognosis is usually 1 to 1.5 years. It is now almost 2. While the original tumor has shrunk maybe giving her another couple of years, another one has developed and has paralyzed her left side. We decided to take her off treatment as she really hasnt had any quality of life for a long time. Its now just a matter of weeks if not days. We have two daughter 13 and 16 which make this so much harder.

     I take my marriage vows very seriously and have been with her every step of the way. We tried a nutritionist in Utah, as well as the standard treatments, supplements, herbs and homeopathic remedies. Anything I read about to keep her alive as long as possible. She fought a good fight but its over now. In the past two years I believe I have first mourned the loss of my marriage and then the loss of the person who I married. Now I am in the role of a caregiver giving medication and changing diapers. She cant get out of bed anymore and into a wheelchair. We can talk but she fades in and out of reality.

Over the course of our marriage, I never thought once about an affair AND I still wouldnt as long as she is still alive. I couldnt live with myself. I will be with her and faithful until the end. Now for my dilema. I am feeling guilty, ashamed and mad at myself as I have fallen in LIKE with a friend of a friend of ours. We have known her for a while and we have always had a lot in common. I wasnt sure before if it was because of all Ive been going through and I feel lonely or if I really had feelings for this person.

She works for this friend of mine and the other day I had to go to his office for something. She was the only one there. It was lunch time and snowing pretty bad. She said she was leaving early and do I want to go to lunch with her on our way home. We did and I havent had a day like that in almost 2 years. We talked and laughed and I had one of the best times of my life. A quick lunch on our way home turned into a 3 hour lunch. As it was snowing pretty bad out we had the whole restaurant to ourselves and had the best time.

We parted ways and later that day I texted her to make sure she got home ok in the snow. I told her I had the best time Ive had in 2 years and thanked her for an amazing 3 hours. She said she felt the same way and would like to do it again some day. She knows my wife and respects what Im going through. I also know now she feels the same way about me. Do you think its normal to be having these feelings right now? Am I just a horrible person for feeling this way? If youve been in my situation please tell me. Like I said, please dont slam me until you have really thought about what we are going through. Then slam away if you must. I would like some honest answers. Thanks in advance.

feelingguilty

New Member

 

Posts: 1

Joined: 12/21/08 12:40 am

[feelguilty]

Woops. Probably should have posted this in the cargiving and grieving forum. Im new here.

[mrscc529]

I sent you a PM.  Please check.  Peace to you.

[mrscc529]

One more message is there. 

Merry Christmas.

[Kelly]

Dear Members,

We are excited to mention that we are moving to a more new and improved message boards on MONDAY MORNING AUGUST 9th! The boards will be done for a few hours while we are making the conversation. Remember we posted information about this move a month ago. For some of you this might seem a bit sudden,  but when we were reviewing the site we determined the current message board you are using is out of date and the company that designed it is no longer in existence. The good news is this new message board will have new features that have been requested in the past like more fields we can add to your profiles and a chat room up to 20 people at one time. If we find the chat room is bursting at the seams we will add additional room for extra people. All your old posts, private messages and such will be migrated to the new message board. You might have to put up your profile picture again but not sure. The new company will be doing the migration for us. Here is a short list of some of the new features on the board:

- Custom Profile Fields

- Users can customize their profile pages by selecting a background color or background image, with tiling options.

- Facebook and Twitter Integration

- users can respond to multiple posts at once with "mini-quote"

- Pinned discussion threads - like welcome to our board etc.

- Announcements made across some boards or the entire message board

- Search: Users can easily find all content generated by a particular member, by clicking the 'Find Content' button that appears on the main profile page, or in the Mini Profile Popup which can be accessed throughout the board. The results page allows content to be filtered by application, as well whether the member created it or merely participated in it.

- Privacy: allows users to sign in anonymously, hiding them from the online users list. Users also have the option to disable personal conversations and user-to-user emails, as well as ignore other users if necessary.

The next exciting piece of news about the new message board is it will have a new domain name of www.grieving.com for search engine optimization purposes. It will still be apart of Beyond Indigo and can be found through www.beyondindigo.com. We will be redirecting your current URL's to this new domain name but we might miss a few. If that is the case simply go back to www.grieving.com or www.beyondindigo.com to find your message board thread. We will try to make the transition as seamless as possible.

The bottom line is the new board will give us room to grow our community and more options to interact better with each other.

If you have any questions please direct them to feedback@beyondindigo.com.

Kelly Baltzell, MA

CEO/President

Beyond Indigo Family