Thanksgiving

Dear Lloyd,

Thanksgiving is near, my first without you in 35 years.  Despite your physical absence, however, much of what I have to be grateful for is tied to you, is because of you. So I take this time to say thank you for all you were in my life and for all that you gave me that so enriched my life.

Soon, in a few weeks, you will have been gone a year.  It seems forever since I have seen  you, since I have heard your voice, comforting and familiar, smelled that scent that was distinctly you.  Sometimes it seems that we have been apart much longer than we were together, though of course that is not true.  How I ache to see you, love, but as I said earlier, I do have much to be grateful for.

When I first started grief counseling, I thought of us as the loser's group.  So many of the women had long term relationships, many much longer than ours.  It hardly seemed fair that we, the women of this group, were the ones who had a spouse to pass on when so many other people would not be all that saddened by such a loss or seek a severance of the relationships they are in. But eventually I became impatient with myself and with the group members realizing that we were not the loser's group:  we had the chance to experience the type of love that only a long term commitment to someone can yield, a love welded by disagreements, tears, laughter, sex, and uncounted life experiences.  Somehow, rather than wedging us apart, as experience seems to do with so many, it soldered us more firmly together.  I have since left the group, moving forward with my life, but I am thankful that they were there and I wish each of them healing and peace and the courage to move forward. We were in the winner's group all along.

I am thankful for the children we created together, for the honorable adults they have become and for the children that they were.  I think briefly of the one time I was ready to leave you, for no relationship is without its storms, the only time you laid a harsh hand on either child.  Jeff was still quite small and you spanked him for trying to leave the yard.  I loved you, but I loved the children as well.  As you know,  I never could wrap my mind around the idea of hitting people you love and what you were supposedly teaching by it.  Yes, I certainly understand the feeling of wanting to hit someone, just not actually doing it.

We were, I told you, a no-hitting family. I remember that you got angry and told me not to ask for your help when they were out of control teenagers.  I also remember when, years later,  you told me that I was right, the same thing your mother told me when she said she did not realize children could be raised that way. As I told you then, it is difficult to be angry and punish someone who already feels so badly about disappointing you.  But punish them I did, just not with hits and swats.  I am thankful that you listened and were open to another way of thinking.  And I am thankful that we had children that did want to please us.  Few people seem to have such easy teenage years, and you were a part of that.

I am thankful for bicycles and remember that you bought me my first bicycle worried that I was running too much and would suffer in injury.  You told me that when I improved, you would buy me a better bike.  And you did.  Little did you realize that you were giving me freedom and a hobby that I would come to cherish and love.  Perhaps you did realize that you were giving me a hobby that would help me deal with my grief in a more constructive manner, a hobby that would bring me friendships that kept me upright at times when I would have hit my knees.

I am thankful for my mother and that she is still with me despite the fact she can't remember what happened five minutes ago.  Thank you for always encouraging me to see her regularly.  And I am thankful for my friends and siblings.  I am amazed at the kindness in most people.  I am thankful for the cats.  Interestingly, when Kitti died I did not intend to get another cat, to be tied down, but you were so lonely home with  only your pain for company while I worked that I decided to adopt again. They helped you while you were living and now they are company for me to ease my loneliness and a reason to get up in the morning.

I am thankful that I have sufficient, nay an abundance, of food, clothing to warm me and cover my nakedness, and a house to call my own.  I remember when we moved here, leaving the mobile home behind.  I remember the sacrifices we made to get this humble little house that became our home.  No, it is not fancy or a mansion, but it is ours, and our love permeated the very being of this house.

And I could go on and on. Thank you, love.  I know that you did without to try to ensure that I would not go without when you were no longer here to protect me.  And while I am not rich in material goods and probably never will be, I should not go  hungry barring a catastrophe.

Things are not the same without you, but life goes on and my time will come before you know it.  I like to think that you will be there waiting, patiently waiting, as you did at my first 5 K and my first triathlons. I miss you, love.  But I am thankful you were in my life and that I was so loved by you. Happy Thanksgiving.   Melissa

The Couch

"I realize there is something incredibly honest

about trees in winter, how they're experts at letting

things go." 

Jeffrey McDaniel

Dear Lloyd,

Yesterday I met Tiffany for lunch.  As we talked she told me I need to replace the couch.  I told her I could not really afford it right now having just spent such a large sum waterproofing the basement, but she knew better.  She said she thought perhaps the reason was because of you.  I assured her that was certainly not the reason, but as I rode my bicycle today I admitted to myself that she is probably right. It is a hard admission as it seems to reek of weakness and vulnerability and an inability to accept reality, but it is what it is.

We needed a new couch for a few years before you died.  As you know, love,  your illness had made you sloppy, spills had stained the fabric in places,  use had worn the cushioning, and cat claws had not helped the edges.  I resisted getting something new while you were alive, though, knowing you and how badly you would feel when you spilled on it and knowing that having the "perfect" living room did not matter much to either of us.  It was the "living" in that room, the people that mattered.

Replacement just did not seem worth seeing your shame.  The hand that was so steady and strong now weakened and shaking.  How our bodies betray us, and how the betrayal brings us shame despite the fact there is nothing we can do to stop the ravages of age or illness.  Were you ashamed to die and leave me?  Since the stroke stole your speech, I will never know; but I pray that you were not.  Why, I wonder, are we ashamed of things we cannot help:  the growing presence of wrinkles, the weakening of once strong arms and legs, and so on..... all the price of life and living.  Still I have shame that I could not save you, shame that I made the difficult decision to let you go not trusting in a miracle, shame that I did not recognize what happened sooner.

Things should not matter so as long as we love and are  loved, and loved deeply, as each of us has been born to do and deserves to be.  Still, they DO matter.  Your weakness did not lessen my love any more than your other faults, though I suspect that I could have let them.  I chose, instead, to concentrate on the things I loved about  you.  I know you did the same with me. In the end, love, the wonder of love and a relationship is that we are loved despite our faults, not because of our perfections.  Our faults, perhaps, give us character, whether good or bad.  And what we cannot help is not, perhaps, a fault after all.

Every morning after awakening, I sit in the same spot that you sat in each day in a house now strangely empty of you.  Oddly enough, it brings me comfort, as if your arms were once more wrapped around me.  In my minds eye I can see you there, a cat on your lap or a book in your hand. It is the spot where we put the hospital bed when I brought you home to die, moving the couch further along the wall.  It is the spot where you passed on to your new existence. There are times I turn from the computer still expecting to see you sitting there, but of course you are not and never will be again however much I want to deny it. Getting rid of the couch is surrendering myself yet again to the realization that you won't ever sit there again, that you don't need a couch. And there remains a part of me that denies the reality that you will never use it again, that you truly are not ever coming home again and I will never hear or feel the lovely sound of your voice wrapping itself around me like a shawl and making me laugh or feel safe or even cry.

The trees were mostly bare during my ride today, stark sentinels against a blue sky, a reminder that everything changes.  Mr. McDaniel is right, they are experts at letting go, experts on seasons and the cyclical nature of things.  Perhaps I need to learn from them in their wisdom and let go.  Perhaps our daughter is right and it is time to buy a new couch.  But not just yet.  Maybe tomorrow. And never think, love, that I don't appreciate what you gave me.  I miss you more than most will ever know.  Until we meet again, love, rest easily.  And I will let go if only because I know it will bring you peace. 

Love, Melissa

Lloyd's Birthday

"You will lose someone you can't live without, 

and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad

news is that you never completely get over the loss

of your beloved.  But this is the good news.  They live

forever in your broken heart that doesn't seal back up.

And you come through.  It's like having a broken leg

that doesn't heal perfectly....that still hurts when the 

weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp."

Ann Lamott

Dear Lloyd,

Happy Birthday, love.  I know that you know that I miss you.  Getting through these "first times" is difficult.  Recently a friend I know who tragically lost a child during a vacation assured me that while it never goes away, it does get easier as the "first times without you" pass. I think he was telling me what I already know and what Ms. Lamott knows:  "You learn to dance with the limp."  (Lamott).  His kindness in light of his own tragedy, much greater than mine, is a balm as I think how our experiences temper us.  May your loss help me to be more compassionate with others.  First times, I fear, are not limited to the first year however, but I assume there become fewer and fewer of them.  Age brings us more negative firsts, but it has hopefully tempered us to be stronger and better prepared to handle them. 

Tiffany took off of work to be with me on your birthday and I decided we should get out of town, so I bought tickets to a play in Indianapolis and booked a room at a hotel with a  swimming pool and hot tub for afterward.  You know how sweet this child is, taking her own vacation time, unasked, to comfort me, to watch over me.  Little does she know that watching over her and her brother is where much of my strength comes from, that age old mothering instinct so necessary to the survival of the species and so necessary to emotional development on both sides.

Normally on your birthday, I am busy cooking your favorite things:  fried fish, unsweetened corn bread with stone ground corn meal from Spring Mill State Park......things I didn't normally fix following your quadruple by-pass in  my vain attempts to keep you with me at least a bit longer.  But not this year.  This year I will not be home, no less cooking. 

I bought tickets for a play I know is off-Broadway: "The Nether."  What I didn't know is that it would be so disturbing involving child molestation and murder.  Engaging?  Yes.  Thought provoking?  Absolutely.  Tiffany and I were still talking about it and sifting through our thoughts and emotions the next day.  Uplifting?  Certainly not.  Then we leave the theater to find that someone has smashed in the side window of my car as well as that of the car behind me.  My bag was left behind, but Tiffany's bag is gone.

While we were able to buy some clothing for her, no swim suits were to be found this time of year.  By the time we waited close to two hours for the police, shopped, and got to the hotel, we were too tired and hungry to do anything but order pizza and prepare for bed.  I slept fitfully, waking at 4:00 a.m. unable to return to sleep.  And it was then that I cried for you, that I gave in fully to my longing for you, for the warmth of you, the part of you that always knew what to do.  You always seemed to make things better, or if not better, more bearable.  Did you ever get tired of being so strong? Was it selfish of me to lean on you?  But deep down, I know you leaned on me too, and that you liked it that I thought what you had to say and what you thought was important.

I know you would not want this weeping, and I am determined to make lemonade with the lemons I was handed so I stop the tears.  You are in a better place, a place where you no longer suffer so. And after all, nobody was mugged or physically hurt.  It is just another unexpected physical expense.  As you would have told me, mere paper.  And I think how much you live even in my thought processes.

When Tiffany gets up, I suggest we go to the zoo before heading home and that we walk the mile to get there and take the few things of value in our purses.  We do only to find that starting today, it closes on Mondays throughout the winter months. Tiffany is feeling so badly, as if every effort to cheer me or distract me is a failure, but I am beginning to see the humor in the situation as you would want me to, and I giggle and then break out in a giant laugh.  As I explain to her why I am laughing, I am also thinking of how odd you used to think it when I would wake at night laughing at times.  But life, while tragic and sad at times, has its funny side, its ironic side.  And as I explain to Tiffany, her gift of her presence is more precious than anywhere she could take me or anything we could do together.

When we get home, Tiffany returns to her life and I head out on my bicycle, the Lynskey. The weather remains amazing:  November yet in the 70's. Suddenly it came to me that there was no better place to be to remember your past birthdays and to celebrate as well as mourn your life.  I think of you carrying Tiffany in the oat bucket when you went out to feed the horses when she was still small.  I  think of us going to Tennessee to buy my bicycle and what a wonderful day we had despite your illness and the pain pills you had to take to survive the car trip.  I think of how you would wrestle with Jeff on the living room floor and of the warmth and love that filled our home.

No, love, you were not perfect.  Many women would not have stayed with you.  But I am glad we weathered those storms to create the life we had, and  I miss it.  Happy Birthday, love.  I miss you and I wish that you were here, but I am learning to dance alone, and there is beauty in that limp, the same beauty you see in the eyes of old people who have weathered life and become wise, the beauty seen in endurance and overcoming obstacles while all the while appreciating the opportunity of life. I will survive the firsts, love, and I will not only survive, but I will use them to hone my appreciation for what is, this I promise you. And I WILL dance.

Love, Melissa

Halloween Memories

"Shadows of a thousand years rise again unseen, 

Voices whisper in the trees, 

Tonight is Halloween."

Dexter Kozen

Dear Lloyd,

Last night I was reading a few of the memories in the memory jar that our daughter made for me.  I still remember how delighted I was and remain with her gift: a jar she decorated herself that is filled with slips of papers on which she put short memories that she has of growing up.  The jar is labeled with instructions that I am to pick out a memory or two whenever I am feeling sad or alone. She was, as you know, hesitant in giving it to me after a lady where she works told her she would not like such a gift at all, that she wants things that are bought in a store.  But you know me, and it is more previous to me than any gift she could have gotten and I treasure it.  I try always to appreciate the time that  people take doing things for me.  I remember a few months before you died, I thanked you for some little chore you had done, and you asked why I always said thank you, particularly for doing something you felt was  your responsibility.  As I told you love, even though it may have been something that was  your responsibility and that you should do, not everyone does those things.  And it is those little things we do for others that knit together the love a family shares.

But back to the Memory Jar, the memory I picked made me smile and was particularly appropriate as it dealt with Halloween and how we used to take a pair of your old jeans and an old shirt, fill them with straw, and make a scare crow to sit in the chair outside.  And of course the cat, being a cat, the cat  you got for me our first Christmas together,  had to avail herself of the lap even if it was that of a scare crow. 

When I spent time with Tiffany today, we talked of that and of how we made a ghost and tied it to post that went over the top of the drive, of how you came home and the ghost walloped the windshield of your truck scaring the dickens out of you and how you would gripe and complain all the while with a smile choked behind your words, belying your sense of humor.  How I miss the way you could make me laugh.

I think your laughter and quirky sense of humor is one of the things that I miss the very most, love. Would it surprise you to know that sometimes I still hear you whisper, that words you said in the past pop up and float through my brain and make me smile?   Laughter, I believe, was part of the glue that held this family together despite having, like any other family, trying times.  

While I was looking for the picture of the scare crow, I ran across some Halloween shots.  Do you remember how I cut up and sewed the couch cover for Jeff's chaps the year he was a cowboy and died old pajamas brown so that Tiffany could be a cat?  Or the year my mom made their costumes?  Do you remember my story of Tiffany going trick or treating the first time and after a few houses telling me, "I don't believe this.  We just knock on people's doors and they give us candy?" 

And I could go on and on.  I remember your stories about turning the outhouse over on  Halloween, of hiding the neighbor's gate, of taking your grandpa's wagon apart and putting it back together on the roof of the shed.  What scamps you boys were and how your mother must have struggled not to laugh as she disciplined you.  Thank you, love, for still making me smile, even though there are those times when tears still mingle with the smiles.  I miss you.  I miss your stories and your humor, but I do remember, at least some of them.  Until we meet again, I remain

Yours , Melissa

The First Birthday Without Him

"We know we are getting old when the 

only thing we want for our birthday is not 

to be reminded of it."

Anonymous

 Dear Lloyd,

Your birthday is rapidly approaching, and even knowing how much you hated birthday celebrations, hated anything that brought you attention and put the spot light on you, it is still and will always be a special day for me.  After all, if you were never born, I could not have met you.  If I had not met you, I suppose perhaps I would have fallen in love with someone else, but I would not have the children and I would not have the life your love helped to form.  And would they have loved me as you did with a love so solid you could almost reach out and touch it? Some things you just never know.  We make the decisions we make, for better or for worse, and they shape our lives.

It has been unseasonably warm, love, but it is starting to get chilly at night.  I don't believe that I have ever had to turn the furnace on or filled the wood stove in the morning when the cold came and chill air snaked through our home for over thirty five years.  When we heated with wood, I would hear the rustling sounds of your movements while I snuggled, only half conscious,  beneath a warm blanket in the bed you vacated only after gently kissing my cheek or my forehead, the bed we bought at the sale barn because we could not afford to buy new.  I remember the smell of you, how your breath would tickle, warm and moist. It is a funny thing about your kisses, how they could range from gentle to burning hot depending upon the circumstances.  How I miss those touches.

When we began heating with a furnace, more than hearing I remember the smell the furnace has when it first gets turned on in the fall.  Always I knew that your doing this was a sign of your love, of your protection: that your care-taking was an extension of and expression of your love. Actions were always so much easier for you than words. You always seemed to feel that words left you more vulnerable.

Always I appreciated it and reciprocated in different ways:  my failed coconut cream pies that you loved so, biscuits that could have been used as ammunition.  You always mastered things so easily whereas I often struggled along, but the effort more than satisfied you.  Your eyes told the tale. You had that odd talent of being able to look beyond the action or the result of the action to the intention behind it. I hope and think you know that I understood and was appreciative. Like the Joni Mitchell song, "Papa brought home the sugar, Mama taught me the deeper meaning."  You see, love, it was not the action itself, but the love that fueled the action.  Thank you for letting me be selfish and stay in the warm bed while your feet hit the cold floor and your skin felt the chill you shielded me from.  This year I will have to turn the furnace on myself. 

Tiffany said she is going to spend your birthday with me.  She did this without being asked which makes it all the more special.  What else would I expect?  She is, after all, your daughter.  Hopefully, she does not feel obligated but wants to spend time with me.  I know the children worry about me, particularly since my break down at Arlington Cemetery where I had to leave and tears careening down my cheeks.  You would scold me, I know, for you never liked for me to be unhappy and you thought it foolish to mourn the dead, those loved ones gone from us.  If we believe in heaven, they are in a better place.  And I witnessed first hand how much pain you had those last years. I know, love, it is selfish of me.  But sometimes I just can't help it.  I just miss you so. You helped to raise fine children though I STILL would have liked a third child despite the fact we really could not afford it ( you got won that disagreement.)

I'll be okay, love.  Wait for me.  Enjoy the company of those that came before.   And Happy Birthday!

Love, Melissa

The Rose Trellis

Dear Lloyd, Today I painted the rose trellis you made for me when we moved here over twenty years ago. The rose we planted there died this winter. I almost decided to tear down the trellis, but I remembered that you gave your time to make it for me for Mother's Day. So despite it being a bit dilapidated by time I painted it as best I could. Now to buy another climbing rose. Thanks, love, for all the time you gave doing things for me just because you knew they gave me pleasure.

And There You Were

"It was evenings like then, when beneath dim

light and relaxing in a sultry bath that she missed

him the most.  A flicker of candlelight, snow against

the window and the soothing scent of creme caramel....

all were a comfort to her as she closed her eyes, 

summoned memories and many a tender thought.  She 

didn't feel deserving of the devotion bestowed upon her, but

she had finally learned to accept its wondrous gift, knowing 

that love was the source of existence and its only end."

Donna Lynn Hope

Dear Lloyd,

I was not sure how to write this as there are no words to express the ravenous yearning that surged through me at the International Story Telling Festival when he sat down.  I could not see his eyes or his face, but his hair was cut just like yours, a few gray wisps intertwined with the silvery whiteness of age.  It was the same length, lay the same.  

His ears held the same curve and thickness, the same skin coloration, and I could see the ear piece of his glasses.  He was dressed in your style of plaid shirt, and it was neatly tucked into his jeans, bound by a thin, tan leather belt as yours always was.  His neck, perhaps a bit thicker, and his waist as well.  But it could have been you sitting there.  

Tears began to stream down my face, for while I knew it could not be you, it was you, and my loss returned as sharply and deeply as it was when first you left me.  I watched you die: I was with you when your soul departed, but somehow here you are.  I wonder what this strange man, so like you, would do if I tapped his shoulder and ask him to hold me, to let me bury deeply into his shoulder as I did yours so often when I was hurt or in need.  For this was what I wanted to do, to fill this need that plagues my nights and days, this endless aching that eases but does not ever truly abate.  The loss that I thought I had dealt with and was behind me instead is in front of me, yet again stretching endlessly,  never dealt with at all.  

And suddenly I notice that the man on stage is talking about the loss of his mother.  While I regret his loss, that he had to go through this, I realize that loss is universal, love, and that we must continue living, and living hard.  To do otherwise would be to dishonor you.  But, oh, how I miss you, my love.  And oh, how I dread the loss of others dear to me without your love to steady me.  My daughter worriedly pats my shoulder, her touch a balm for my wounds.  How I hate having her see this on her yearly girls' birthday trip.

But then I realize your love is not gone:  it surrounds me in these things you left behind, odd things like the labeled shut off valves for the water, the labeled fuse box.  It lives in this house that I asked God to bless before we moved in, this house where we raised our children, where we loved, where we argued and made up,  and  yes, where you died.  I will not dishonor those gifts, my love, and I will not dishonor your life and those gifts by not living mine.

The man stands up and turns to leave and of course he is not you.  That must wait for another world and another time.  Oh, the stories that I will have to tell you and to get your thoughts on.  Until then, rest easy.  I will be alright.  

Love, Me

July 2015

Dear Lloyd,  After a rough couple of weeks, things have been a bit better.  I told someone recently that I feel like I always imagined those with bi-polar disorder must feel.  But I have been able to force myself back out on the bike, and I have even enjoyed it at times.  The effort aids my sleep, and I do feel better.

Today I got off at 10:30 flexing out my overtime from earlier in the week.  Computers at work were down and I have so much to catch up with anyway.  So....today shed number two got the first two coats of crabby apple red and I started on the trim.  I ran into a place in the back where either an animal gnawed the wood or it is starting to rot a tad.  Of course, I can no longer ask you what to do, so I pondered on it and think I have found a solution that will work.  When the walls on this shed go, it is gone.  You did not build it as you did the other and so it is not as special.  It would have killed another little bit of me to lose that shed.  But the rot is only a tiny place.

How I miss having your guidance and thoughts.  More and more, I realize that I am lonely.  Odd, I never really minded being alone before when I knew you were waiting.  Now it is just different.  I miss being held and I miss being kissed and I miss being loved.  I miss the smell of you, love, and the sound of your voice, and I particularly miss your laughter and quirky sense of  humor.  I miss feeling like home is home.  I try to have faith that we will be together again sometime, but I am not as strong as you, and I am certainly not as good as you were despite the times you put down the Bible telling me your frustration for not being able to live as you felt you should.

While I worked I thought of the look on your face when I told you to go buy the shed for your bee equipment.  Trudging up and down the basement steps carrying bee equipment was obviously becoming harder and harder for you, and I did not want you to lose the thing you loved doing the most.  Your illness and poor health had already stolen so many of those things.  You were so excited, like a child on Christmas Eve.  So much of your life you did not get things that you wanted...I suppose it made you where you did not even ask for those little extras.  That way you could not be disappointed.  And now that shed will last a bit longer.  Maybe as long as I reside here for who knows what the future will hold.

 As we aged together, I saw more and more how your childhood and your early adult experiences molded the person you became and was able to understand you a bit better.  You were not an easy person....so private and so determined to cover the big soft, vulnerable spot that was your heart, the one you eventually gave to me until I was encased in the soft pillow of your love.  I think, and perhaps I am being conceited, but that with my love you healed a bit.  I hope so. I miss you,  love, but I am moving forward as best I can as I know you would want me to do and healing as well. 

"If you get there before I do, don't give up on me.  I'll see you when  my chores are through.  I just don't know how long I'll be." 
(Collin Raye)

All my love.  Melissa

The First Visit

Dear Lloyd, I am so blessed. Jeff and Lena came for a visit and we have spent nearly their entire vacation this week rebuilding the shed you and I were supposed to rebuild this summer. Jeff said that he promised you on your deathbed that he would always do his best to see that I was taken care of and had what I needed. I think his goodness must have seeped in from living with you. I fear I am not so giving and kind.
I feel guilty about their sacrifice, but I also feel proud that we raised a child who became such a kind and talented young man. And I hope Lena's parents know what a gem they raised. Never once has she begrudged me Jeff's help and has chipped in and done more than her share. Amazingly, she looks beautiful even in my work clothes which dwarf her, but then perhaps it is her inside goodness shining through.

I now understand why you put the shed together with screws instead of nails. I remember you said Randall laughed at you because of it and I think how much Randy must miss your company. I can still hear him on the phone asking for "George Albert" and I was always glad you men shared a hobby that brought you together periodically.
We found the sword Jeff constructed as a child nailed inside, a remembrance and tribute to youth and memories. I sobbed and sobbed because I miss you so, but somehow I felt closer to you. One thing I miss is sharing the memories we had created together, those things you remember and know that the other person remembers as well without even talking, and this was like sharing a memory in some ways.
My back is sore and I am feeling very tired and very old, but we are near completion, and I guess the older I get the closer I am to being with you again, love, because I have heard you laughing as we worked together, making mistakes but making progress. Until then, love, I wish you peace and no more pain.

bravery without you

Dear Lloyd,

Yesterday I came home to find the chimney cap in the yard. The screws had rusted through. Today I started to climb up to measure so I could replace it, and what I found is that I am quite the coward without you here. All the times I patched the old roof while you held the ladder and told me what to do, I thought about the time you made me wear a harness thrown over the top and tied to the truck bumper before I found my roofing legs . I thought about how badly you felt about the blisters on my hands from trying to work the caulker with the tar in it. But that was a shingled roof. This metal roof is much harder to walk, even barefoot. Anyway, I chickened out, love, part way up, came in, and called to get an estimate. Who knows, tomorrow I might be braver, and there may be something on the internet about the best footwear for walking metal. But if not, this is one thing that I will pay to have done. Chores are not as much fun without you. I miss how you always seemed to know what to do when something broke. I just am not as smart as you were. But I am trying.

The First Father's Day Alone

"Oh the comfort, the inexpressible comfort

of feeling safe with a person, having neither to 

weigh thoughts or measure words, but pouring

them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together,

certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, 

keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of

kindness blow the rest away."

Dinah Craik

Tomorrow is Father's Day, my love, the first without you.  Our children, though now grown, will need some words of comfort I fear, and I have so little to give them.  Like me, I believe they felt safest with you.  How many people have someone in their lives that would die for them as you would have for each of us had the need ever arisen?  I still miss you so much that at times I fear I will go crazy.  But there are the memories you left me, always the memories, and sometimes I feel that death freed you so that you are now everywhere with me, just in a different form.  

You are in the wind that kisses my cheek on a windy ride, the sun that scalds my skin and warms my bones so that the aches of old age recede.  You are in the trees that shade the roads I pass along, the hawk that flies overhead.  You are in the rain that greens the grass and the fields and the deer that quickly crosses the road in front of me melting ghostlike into the forest. And sometimes I think it makes sense if we join God, become part of God, when we die, that you are in all of those things and it is not just some weird trick of my imagination.  But it is still not the same.  I miss the physical you that laughed and joked and talked and held me.  I miss the smell of you and the feeling of safety you brought into my life.

The first pregnancy was so thrilling, wonderful, and scary.....so miraculous as my body changed and shifted making way for new life. The first flutter of life that soon gave way to small feet and hands moving across my stomach in the age old pattern of growth and being. I remember the morning sickness, so bad that they were going to put me in the hospital for dehydration, that finally eased. I remember how you scolded me for turning cartwheels on the way to the mailbox fearing it would cause me to miscarry.  You never criticized or questioned my desire for children, never made me feel guilty for wanting the family we eventually birthed together.  

I remember my labor, mostly in my back because she was turned the wrong way, and the hours  you spent rubbing and calming as I strained to bring our daughter, her sex yet unknown at the time, into the world.  I suppose my only regret is that you did not come with me into the delivery room, but yet I understood when you told me your fear that it would make you unable to ever touch me again.  Pain fell away, forgotten, meaning little, when I laid my eyes on her, this miracle that we created with our love. 

And then came the second child, this time a boy.  That time they tried to send us home from the hospital but I refused, insisting on staying.  The doctor barely made it on time.   Had we left, there would have been no choice:  not only would you have been in the delivery room, but you would have been the deliverer, probably on the highway before we reached home.  

So on this Father's Day, despite your absence, I thank you, love, for those children that you gave me.  They both have been blessings in so many, many ways.  How I wish you were still here to continue sharing them with me.

An Anniversary Memory

"An anniversary is a time to celebrate 

the joys of today, the memories of yesterday, and 

the hopes of tomorrow."  Anonymous

And so it approaches, my first anniversary without you.  I remember when we were picking which day to wed:  it was a leap year and you thought to marry me on the 29th.  Not so many anniversaries that way.  And you did not think there would be many, my love, despite my whisper to your sleeping ear that I would not leave you.  

This has been a hard month with Valentine's Day and our anniversary nestled cheek to cheek, and the other Christmas gifts I found that you had bought and hidden in your closet undid me.  It was as if you found a way to send me a surprise for those celebrations without being here.  Again, more gifts for the bike:  booties, sun glasses, socks. I miss you, my love, my friend, my safe place.  This world is, indeed, a stranger without you.

The snow fell relentlessly not long ago, and cold poured out across our home.  The weatherman said it was the coldest weather in over twenty years.  The snow made me think of one anniversary when the children were still so small and I was not yet working outside the home.  Another gift you gave to me, never griping at the luxuries and extras we lacked by my choice to raise our children myself.  One two liter pop to share per week:  a luxury.  But that is another story perhaps for another day.  

Despite normally enjoying staying home with the children, I so looked forward to our going out for our anniversary and having some couple time.  With money so tight, this adult treat happened only rarely, its very rareness making it more special than it might otherwise have been.  But the snow fell, the endless snow, cold and unyielding, trapping us inside.  I remember crying in the hallway when I finally realized that it would not quit and that we could not go have our special time, and I remember the warmth of your arms as you held me and let me cry.  I remember the way your breath whispered across the side of my neck, so soft and caressing.  And I remember your answer to my traditional anniversary question:  "Would you, knowing all of me, all my faults, my selfishness, my bad things, would you marry me again?" Yes, my love, yes.