cw:angst, mentions major character death, mentions of terminal illness, medications, hospice, female reader
Home care is almost worse than the hospital.
There isn’t a respite from anything. You don’t get to lay on your couch and forget that your husband is dying when he’s sitting five feet away. You don’t get to come home to silence when there’s a nurse waiting to update you on the day.
Grief becomes your life.
You ignore the stacks of bills on the kitchen table, forget about the unwashed laundry, and just toss your things into the second bedroom. You used to jokingly refer to it as the nursery, but it’s slowly morphed into your home office now that your work has started pitying you enough to let you work remotely a couple days a week.
When you enter the bedroom, Takahiro is slumped against the mountain of pillows you’ve collected over the months. He looks up from his switch and tries to blink the exhaustion from his eyes. He looks like shit- swallow and swollen, yet more delicate than ever. It’s… pathetic, for lack of a better word. Closer to an old man than a millennial.
There was a minute where everything felt okay. The effects of chemotherapy wore off and Takahiro no longer felt like a shadow of himself. He insisted on going on day trips, inviting friends over, enjoying life- fuck, you even had sex again after a long, long time.
