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

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 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.