Sometimes I think it was all a dream…

He told me he's going to die in two days, I didn't ask how he knew.

His hospice doctor, I could tell, knew something too because his eyes grew sadder each time he visited that week.

My husband was rarely wrong, that much I knew. I got to know him well in the 18 years of our marriage.

I watched him sleep, his lashes trembling on sunken sockets. His nose was straight and lips pale with illness — all still handsome to me.

He had RSD, or reflex sympathetic dystrophy, a neurological illness, chief symptom — overwhelming pain. The pain was bad — some patients resorted to suicide. We learned that from the RSD support newsletter.

I could have written a Ph.D. thesis on RSD that was how much we read and knew about this stupid illness by living with it for over a decade.

The pain begins in one spot, usually after an injury, and spreads all over the body. Painkillers are of little help. In a few years, the atrophy of nerves and muscles sets in. At the end the heart or brain fail — full stop, the end.

That's where we were now, edging toward the finish line, the climax, the conclusion of his life, my life, our life.

For years, we were like two warriors on the battlefield, fighting tooth and nail. Now, he was pinned to his back, unable to get up. I sat by his side unable to do anything about it.

My husband, the man who made me happy like nobody else. I couldn’t cry. I wanted to but couldn’t.

I watched his chest moving up-and-down, up-and-down, as if it counted the minutes left, and the memories flooded back at me, one after another like waves crashing against the shore.

The beginning of it would be that summer, eighteen years ago, when I placed a personal ad in one of Riga's papers.

That's when Nina called. Nothing would happen without Nina.

That year, I moved to the Latvian capital, Riga. It was so different from Tula where I grew up, 100 miles south of Moscow.

Riga had castle-like buildings, the Baltic Sea with golden sand beaches.

Tula had arms factories and communist billboards. I didn’t need that. I needed the world.

I was in Riga because I got a job there — a physician for the Latvian Olympic Swimming team. My job was to keep the swimmers in top form and attend to their medical needs.

How did I get the job? By calling the head doctor of the sports center. It's amazing what you could achieve if you dare.

I studied for my MD in Tula State University and worked as an emergency care physician in Tula before scoring my dream job in Riga.

My sports doctor job had a sexy title, yet it was a low paying job because all state jobs were low paying jobs.

Here I was, poor as a church mouse, placing a free personal ad in the tabloid paper that said,

A 32-year-old Russian lady would like to practice English with a native speaker.

Two lines of small text, no picture, my phone number included. Nina was the only one who called me. Nobody else did.

The native English speakers? Those men had better things to do. The bars in Riga were full of girls, all beautiful, and none of them were there to practice English.

I never understood the bars, maybe that's why my personal life was a disaster.

When Nina phoned me, she slapped me with a question, “Are you trying to bag a foreigner so you can leave the country?”

“What?” I said, but Nina seemed to be seeing right through me.

Of course. A foreigner. Why not? Soviet men felt too dull for my restless self or had I become too adventurous for my own good?

“You need some help,” Nina said. “You're not doing it right. Let's be friends.”

Nina was twenty-five years old and teaching at a school. She had the deep cleavage of a sophisticated Russian beauty and the large brown eyes of a cat in distress.

Nina and I became fast pals.

With Nina, it was always the anticipation of life-changing. One day she brought me a crinkled page ripped out of an international dating magazine.

The page had six personal ads from men residing all over the world. Brief ads were black and white with tiny photos.

I remember how we clutched that glossy sheet, our heads together. We scanned each word, our eyes darting from one ad to another.

My heart thudded as I spotted him. The classic features, the high cheekbones made him look so noble. He seemed to be smiling right at me.

It felt as if my soul was a frozen pond until that point and began to thaw right there.

I read — Wesley, 53 years old, psychologist and poet, and the Miami addresses. How cool is that?

I couldn't help it; something inside told me “go”. Like a green light was given to me from the powers that be saying “you can have him, girl, go for it.”

He was two decades older than me and even that felt exciting. Everything feels special when you are falling in love.

I wrote to him in my broken English, trying hard not to cry.

Soon, he replied with an invitation to visit him in Miami. It was the time when Soviet citizens could only leave the country if they had an invitation, he knew that.

I still have all of our letters, full of unbridled passion for each other. We wrote at least 40 of them back and forth, in longhand, while waiting for my exit papers to come through.

My pal Nina read his letters and laughed, mocking everything he wrote. It was okay because I needed her sarcasm. The passion raged through my body. She tried to cool me off with a gentle jab in my ribs.

After two months of interviewing at the American embassy in Riga, and countless papers I had submitted and re-submitted, I finally boarded an Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Miami.

In 24 hours of worrying on the plane, I collapsed into his arms at the Miami airport crying, unable to take a breath.

That's how the two of us, total strangers from opposite sides of the world, became as one — thanks to Nina, or a torn page from a magazine, or whatever else controls destiny.

How did he know we were perfect for each other from reading my letters? Why did he want me? I have no idea.

Maybe he watched the Doctor Zhivago movie one too many times and thought of me as the leading female character, Lara.

I wanted him because I never met anyone like that before — a handsome American, six feet two, and a poet…

As if he could hear what I thought, he opened his eyes and smiled at me flat on his back. He didn’t believe in being sad or depressed no matter what.

I lost him, in two days, just as he said. He went out instantly as if it were his last act of defiance.

He was telling a story. I sat next to his bed. We were laughing — the next moment, he was gone. He just stopped breathing, still smiling.

I startled and fell on his chest wailing. My future life felt meaningless.

Yet, things needed to be done, so I got up and dialed Hospice on our green rotary phone. They would come soon and do what they had to do.

Dear Readers, thank you for reading! I write mostly about love. Feel free to share my stories with your loved ones. Special Thanks to Pam Mayer — my tireless friend, editor, and collaborator.