Status of Ex

This is a hard and complicated post. I just want to get this out of my system. I'm not looking for comments or hugs.

When I say "my ex", people always nod and say "oh" as though they know what our relationship looks like. But it's not that clear cut. When I go in to work tomorrow and talk about my weekend, I don't know if I should say "my ex" or "one of my best friends that I've been mad at for the past two or three years." Not really mad at, just mad. Mad at the choices he made that ended up with him being jobless and homeless.

He went into the VA hospital a couple of weeks ago. Friday day they had to operate and a little after midnight on Friday night they called me. (He put me down as his emergency contact.) They thought he had a major heart attack, he'd been without a pulse for 20 minutes, but they would keep trying CPR. At 25 minutes they got a pulse back and called again to let me know. We (my mom, my new husband, my son and I) went out the hospital in the wee hours of Saturday morning (or late hours of Friday night) and stayed there with him for a few hours. We went back again in the afternoon on Saturday and just got back from seeing him again today.

CPR keeps some oxygen flowing to the brain, but not a lot. There's a lot of brain damage. He can open his eyes, but he can't blink on command. He can't move. He can't even twitch his fingers. He's dying. His brother has given a DNR instruction to the hospital today, which I'm grateful for.

We were married for 20 years. We have a 16 year old son. I've cried more in the past two days than I thought was possible, but I'm not sure if I'm crying for my ex, for me, or for our son.