Home is a blue house we had built in Belize. People asked us whose idea it was to move to here. We would look at each other and shrug. I think it was David’s and I said let’s do it.

I was more than ready to retire from nursing. I felt I was slipping. The kids at work were bright, knowledgeable and sharp. As privileged as I was to work with them I felt oppressed by patients, physicians and management. We approached customer service like it was a Home Depot instead of a hospital. I hated the call and the constant stresses within the department. The satisfaction that made it all worthwhile no longer existed for me. The adrenaline rush was long gone. It was past time for me to go.

David’s job was incomprehensible. Have you ever seen a computer screen filled with code and known what you were looking at, where the defect was? I knew that he had the mind for it and was good at problem solving. He called himself “an old main frame programmer”.  He would talk to me of FPS (his baby) or WIZRO or some other ACRONYM-RO. It was all greek to me but I tried to listen. God knows he sat through a hundred after work bitch sessions with my coworkers. He liked his job and his work family. Still, he too, began to feel out of date. Over the years the company tried and tried again to replace old systems with software. He knew it was a matter of time before they would eventually succeed. The old gang had already broken up. They would replace a lot of what he had helped build over the last twenty five years. After retirement he subcontracted back on a part time basis. It helped offset the expense of the move and settling in here. He grew tired though and quit soon after I took social security. We no longer depended on his monthly income. David died eight months later.

After our vacation to Belize in 2012 we decided to make the move. My only request was that we do it as soon as we could. I didn’t think I could last several more years on the job. Don’t think it hasn’t occurred to me that maybe if we had taken our time and taken a few more years to plan David might have been within ten minutes of an angiogram suite when his heart attack occurred. Or he could have blown the artery in his head while mowing grass up at the dome (another property we owned at the time) and the outcome would have been the same without the experiences of the last three years.