Today is the fifteenth of the month, mid march, a day the Romans referred to as the Ides.  In Shakespeare's play, Julius Caesar, Caesar met his doom on March 15.  Today's date caused me to think about my own Ides of March that happened ten years ago.  This time ten years ago, my second wife Anne had nine days of life remaining.  Suffering from lung cancer, she was in intense pain.  She didn't have long left on this earth and everyone seemed to know it except me.

In 1998, the Ides was on a Sunday.  I called Anne's doctor, trying to get her in to see someone.  It was no use.  Her doctors had already given up on her and she was a non-entity.  Anne wasn't a non-entity with me.  When I got an associate doctor on the phone, I resorted to begging.

"Please, isn't there something you can do?  I need some help here."

"Come by the office and I will give you a prescription for a painkiller," the doctor told me.  I left Anne alone for an hour while I retrieved the prescription.  "This is Oxycontin," he told me.  "It's the most powerful painkiller that I have."

I hurried home and gave Anne a pill.  It seemed to help and soon she felt good enough that she asked me to draw her bath.  Our bathtub is large and deep.  When I took her clothes off and got her into the tub, she asked me to join her.

"I am so sorry that I am putting you through all of this," she said.

"There's no place on the face of the earth that I would rather be," I said.

Anne was on constant oxygen, but the following day she was in good spirits and breathing on her own.  She had a smile on her gorgeous face and I breathed a deep sigh of relief for the first time in many days.

"It's March Madness," I said, referring to the big year-end basketball tournament.  "And the first Formula 1 race of the year.  Whatever you do, you can't get too sick this weekend or you'll spoil everything for me."

I was kidding but I'll never forget how selfish those words now sound.  Shortly, Anne's condition grew worse.  I reluctantly compare myself to Caesar.  On his way to the forum he encountered the seer that had told him to beware the Ides of march, and he said, "The Ides of March has come."

The seer answered, "Yes, the Ides of March has come, but it has not passed."

Anne lasted another several days but that day, on her back on an ER table, she looked at me, and without speaking a word, she bade goodbye with her eyes.

No one before or since has ever penned a tragedy like Shakespeare.  Knowing my own pain, I can only imagine what he must have encountered during the Ides of March of his life.