November 2nd

"Where you used to be, there is a hole in

the world, which I find myself constantly

walking around in the daytime and falling 

in at night.  I miss you like hell."

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Dear Lloyd,

Happy Birthday, my love, on this, the second birthday without you.  It is odd, knowing how you hated your birthday and never wanted a fuss, that this is one of those days that I struggle with getting through for I know you would have wanted me to forget that it exists, that this was the day you entered the world and began to prepare yourself for our life together.  I have taken off work today, love.  The temperature is unseasonably warm, and I intend to explore some new roads on my bicycle on your special day.  Perhaps I should have worked, but I hope to celebrate you today, to concentrate my thoughts on how lucky I was to have found you and to have had you in my life for as long as I did.  Whether I can or not remains to be seen, but at work I most certainly would have mourned. 

 Life goes one without you:  some old patterns continue missing the richness of the strand you provided, some new patterns are emerging,  and some patterns have been irrevocably lost to me as you are.   I feel incomplete.  There are so many things I want only to share with you, and over time I have come to realize even more all the holes in life that you somehow managed to fill.  I particularly miss your saying that things will be okay when something bad happened, and somehow, because you shouldered some of the burden, they were.  But perhaps, in light of the difficulties of this year, it is good that you are not here, for I know anything that hurt me bothered you as much or more than anything that hurt you.  That was part of the relationship we had:  when one was cut, the other bled.

I still talk to you, love, and I still hear what you would say in my mind, but your voice is leaving me.  I remember your smell, I remember how you looked, I remember your touch, warm and comforting and always sexy, and I particularly remember your words, but the sound of your voice seems so distant and it bothers me that I can't recall it except in wisps that are peppered here and there.  Danny came to visit a bit back, and the speech patterns brought you back, but he has his own life and lives so far away.  He misses you too, love, and talked about sometimes he feels you are there, playing with him, when the wind knocks his hat off or something unexpected happens.  He, like so many, tell me I should find someone else, but frankly, nobody is knocking down the door to be with me and I am unsure how you meet people in this new world of computers and such.  As I told him, it is hard to find someone who wants a sixty year old when he can have a forty year old.  I am not resigned to being alone for the rest of my life, but I have accepted that I very well could be.  And it is not, love, so very terrible.  I am discovering strengths in myself that I did not know existed before.  You know I always loved the lines in the Rascal Flatts song, "I've found you find strength in your moments of weakness."  I can't say I am at peace with everything, but I have found acceptance.

The children have adjusted, love, though just this past week-end Tiffany told me that she still thinks of you almost daily.  I feel certain Jeff does as well.  As you would know, he was always the sensitive one, an artist at heart.  And certainly I do, sometimes with a smile and sometimes with tears and sometimes with both. Rest assured that despite the pain of loss, if given a choice as to whether to have what we did and face that loss or lose the pain, thus losing the love, I would make the same choices.  As I reaffirmed on every anniversary, I would say yes again.  

Until my time comes, love, take care and don't worry.  I will muddle through somehow.  Happy Birthday, love.  Today I will look for you in the fall leaves, the wind, the open fields, and the forests.  

All my love, Melissa

Danny

 "Hope for love, pray for love, wish for love, dream for love

....but don't put your life on hold waiting for love."

Mandy Hale

Dear Lloyd,

Today your brother, Danny, surprised with a phone call saying he was in town and would like to visit.  It was so good to see him and to hear his voice, to spend time with someone who loves you differently, but as much as I love you.

We went to dinner and he, as others have done, told me I should find someone else.  He said it is what you would have wanted for me, and I know that.  But finding someone, love, is easier said than done.  Yes, I do miss the comfort of a love relationship.  I miss male companionship, but as I told Danny, there are not so many 60 year old men that want a 60 year old woman when there are younger women available.  And I am such an odd person.  No need trying to hide it.  Even you, my love, told me not long before you died that Tommy was right, I was strange.  I grin thinking of you always asking me, "What the hell are you doing now?"  To you, my eccentricities were amusing, but not so to those less tolerant.

I miss you love and I am lonely without you.  Even after all this time, not a day goes by when I don't think of you, not just once, but many, many times.  But I am getting by.  No need to worry.  I am fine and moving on.  Your baby brother is getting by, and he is blessed with an ever growing family of grandchildren to keep him young.   Rest in peace, my love. I often smile rather than cry when I think of you now. And yes, I wish, hope, and pray for love in my life, different perhaps than your love, but still love that will light my way as the years darken my senses.  But if it does not appear, my life is not on hold.  I am moving forward. 

Love always, Melissa

Father's Day 2016

Dear Lloyd,
On this day, a day when we honor what men can be, what they should be, and what many are but, sadly, many are not, I want to wish you a Happy Father's Day and to thank you for the gift of our children. Were you perfect? Thankfully, no. But you were a good father in many, many ways. The children may not have had everything that they wanted or even needed at times, but they had what they needed most: love from a father that would have gladly laid down his life for them if necessary. A father that loved their mother. A father that did the best he could with what he had and where he came from. So many things they learned from you, some of which they don't even realize. I see you in them time and time again, a certain smile, an action, a joke.
Rest well, love. Happy Father's Day. And thank you. On this day, you are truly missed. All my love, Melissa

"Let us be grateful to people who make us happy,

they are the charming gardeners who make our souls

blossom." 

Marcel Proust

Dear Lloyd,

Sunday will be the second wedding anniversary without you, love, always a difficult time.  Yet I find myself grateful that we had as long together as we did.  When I watch the news or read the news on line, it only serves to emphasize the blessings that were ours.  It would be nice to think that we deserved this, but in the end I don't think we deserve things so much as we are blessed with them.  I hold onto that or I do not think I could go on. 

As I rode my bike the other day, I remembered how I could bathe in the depths of your eyes, liquid brown, renewing myself.  I remembered the softness of your caress, the kindness and love that filled your voice, even when I had made yet another awful mistake.  And I still hold your words close, some more special than others.  The time you told me I was the most beautiful woman in the restaurant, also an anniversary.  Of course, I  knew it was not true, except in your eyes, but your eyes were all that mattered.  The time you told me that essentially I am a kind person knowing how harshly I can judge myself and my actions and my many failures.  Often I smile now when I think of you, though there are still occasional tears.  I can't help but miss you.  Sometimes, love, I just feel so very alone.

Unless they cancel it, I will be riding Sunday though I fear I have come down with a slight cold.  I find it is best to keep myself occupied.  It is my century route from Jeffersonville to the Maple Syrup Festival in Salem.  And I will be thinking of you and praying that you are well in God's care.  As your brother Danny said when he learned of your death, "Fly, Delbert, fly!"   Wait for me, love. Despite my many failings, God could not be so cruel as to put you in one place and me in another.

Love, Melissa

 

Another Valentines Day

"How did it happen that their lips came together?

How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts,

that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the 

stark shape of trees on the quivering summit of the hill?

A kiss, and all was said."

Victor Hugo

Dear Lloyd, 

For some odd reason, this Valentine's Day seems so much harder to bear than last years, despite this being my second Valentine's without you.  Things are going well, love, but I miss you.  Often I make it through the day without tears or sadness, though never without thinking of you.  Strange how nobody thought we would stay together, and yet our love remained as strong as steel.  Today I drank my coffee from one of the corny Valentine's mugs you got me:  #1 wife.  I will miss the flowers and card on the counter, the feeling of being cherished in the way only a spouse can cherish a partner.  It was never about the gift; it was about what was behind the gift.

 I miss the soft whisper of your breath on my neck.  And I miss being held when I cry and told that things will be alright because sometimes it seems that things will never be alright.  I miss your jokes and the funny things you said to make me smile.  I miss your touch, the way you somehow made the callouses of your hands as soft as silk and as gentle as a lamb for you knew I had too much roughness in my past.  For you knew me, love, in ways that nobody else ever has.....fears, vulnerabilities, dreams, longings.  And still you loved me. 

I hope that on this Valentine's Day  couples will take a good, long look at each other and think of what brought them together.  I hope they will fall in love all over again. Because too often in the dreary drudgery of time, we forget, only to remember when it is too late. Like a garden, love grows best when it is nurtured and cultivated.

Hold hands.  Sing to each others hearts.  Be lovers this Valentine's Day.  Kiss long and deeply, kiss every inch of each other, for if you have that special partner, you are blessed and rich in a way that goes far beyond gold or silver.  As were we, love.  Thank you.  Wait for me.  Like a child, I throw your kiss upward toward heaven.  Wishing you were here, Melissa

 

 

New Years Eve 2015

"Whether we want them or not, 

the New Year will bring new challenges; 

whether we seize them or not, the New 

Year will bring opportunities."

Michael Josephson

Dear Lloyd,

Another New Year without you in it.  As I sit alone this New Years Eve, I realize it seems as if our time together was a dream from years and years ago and yet just yesterday.  Is it truly possibly that this will be my second year without your loving presence?  

I think of the differences a year has wrought:  pain remains, but not so piercing or pervasive as acceptance has doggedly nudged denial aside. Life it seems bubbles to the surface. I don't think one could live for long with the pain so sharp and rending.  I try to remain glad for what we had and to fend off bitterness about what was not to be, what will never, ever be.  And I know that you would know that I cannot stay here, that I must move forward.  I must open myself to possibilities. Unlike my cousin's husband who made her promise never to remarry or to have a relationship, I know you would want me to move forward, to be happy.  Unlike my cousin, I could never, would never, have made such a promise.  Does this, I wonder, mean I loved you less?  I think not, but how does one judge or compare emotions?  Still, despite the fact I know you would want me to have another relationship if it should present itself and be loving, it feels a betrayal somehow.

Whether or not future  happiness involves another man, I do not know though I start to wonder about it at times. I do know it is not dependent upon it.  I realize that I  have very mixed feelings about becoming involved again.  I question if I could ever again commit to someone the way I did to you, lay myself wide open, vulnerable, belly open to evisceration. Still  I miss having someone that I can completely trust, to whom I can relay every thought, every emotion, even those that, while human, make me look small and petty, even in my own eyes.  I miss having someone with whom to share life's experiences for sharing makes them richer somehow. And I miss being held and the feeling of safety that I had in your arms.  And I particularly miss caring for someone, doing those things that bring them pleasure and light their eyes in that special way.

I question if the opportunity to even make this decision on a relationship will ever present itself to me.  Statistics tell me that most widows never remarry.  I was never breathtakingly beautiful, exceptionally charming, unusually intelligent:  I was and am just me, a rather plain, ordinary woman rendered more plain and more ordinary by the years that have passed and the sun that has battered me on long bicycle rides.  Are only those genetically blessed deserving of being cherished?  Sometimes it seems that way, at least on the outside; but I am old enough to know that looks can deceive.

 I think of how someone in the past year was laughing at how women at their church approached their widowed father in an attempt to forge a relationship, and I hope that I am never considered desperate if I decide to approach someone despite the fact I know that I am not. None of us want to be the object of ridicule or pity.  And I wonder if that woman will ever be subjected to or understand loneliness. Is it shameful somehow or amusing that people want that basic connection with another person and attempt to get  their needs met?  To me it seems rather troubling rather than funny.

One thing the last year has taught me is that I can live alone, and that I can be relatively happy living alone.  Still the thought of never being held, never being loved again, is just too sad.  My mother, who divorced in her fifties and is now in her nineties and never had another man/woman relationship, lists not trying harder to establish such a relationship as one of her regrets. Will I repeat her mistake?  And if it was a mistake for her, would that necessarily mean it would be a mistake for me?  My life has settled into a routine that I am comfortable with.  Do I really want to disrupt it?  Or will it even be an issue?  Perhaps no one will ever be interested in me romantically again.  And if they are, would it somehow be a betrayal of what we were?  Sometimes, love, I get confused, and I miss having you hear to talk to and to help me sort things out.

So many questions plague me this New Year, love.  You and others have often told me that I "think too much," and perhaps you were right.  But it is, you know, a part of the me that you loved, or at least tolerated in the name of love.  My New Year would be happier with you here but you are not. Still there will be, I am certain, new  opportunities if I open my eyes and seize them.  In many ways each New Year is a present to be unwrapped, what is inside unknown until the paper is stripped and the box opened.  May I not overlook opportunities that present themselves if those opportunities will enrich my life, and not just in relationships. After all, what if I had overlooked you? I still remember when we first met and you thought I could not get the wheelbarrow full of horse manure out the damned barn door.  I showed you, didn't I;-)   Even in the midst of manure there can be flowers if we open our eyes.

Happy New Year, love!  Wait for me.  Melissa