Spare Change

Finally. They’re going to let me move into the house. I’m going to have a home again, Baby. Queen Creek approved the electric blueprints and in a couple of weeks I’ll move into the home you made sure I’d have.

You were my home. You were always my home. You knew that, didn’t you? God, I hope you knew that. I know you’re close by. You keep sending me signs so I’ll know you see me. And hear me. But I can’t see you. I keep breathing by faith, believing that I’m really hearing you, seeing your real-time love notes, and knowing you’re near.

Like the dimes. I found the first one lying on the ground beside my truck when I stopped at a gas station on the way to your memorial service last summer. It seemed odd because normally I only see pennies, so I picked it up and dropped it in the tray in the truck. The next day it happened again. Then I learned that dimes are often an encouragement that our love is close, so I kept keeping them, however they appeared, as long as it was simply . . . dimes.

That’s how I know the one I found in my pocket last week was from you. A shiny new 2022 dime. At the very moment my heart cried out in that desperate prayer I’ve been reduced to since you left—“Help”—a dime suddenly showed up. I’d washed and vacuumed the truck that morning, cleaning out that little console tray and putting the treasured collection of dimes in my pocket. I returned them all when I was finished. But one of them was a stowaway, I guess. I was sure I’d put them all back. And maybe I did. There’s always a logical explanation for the signs, it seems. But there’s no explanation for the timing.

I tell people I have an investment in heaven now that you’re there, but it feels like more than that. I walk around in this dimension only half listening while my ear is pressed up hard against the one where you are. Half in and half out, this is my new existence. Listening with my spirit feels like talking with someone underwater. Or learning a new language. It’s not as easy as some people make it sound which leads me to think they’re just repeating things they’ve heard other people say. I’m learning to tell the difference between fresh baked bread and the reheated stuff.

I’m also learning to depend on God the way I once depended on you. I’ve always struggled with that. Guilt is crippling and confusing. I think church teaching has messed up the simplicity of two imperfect hearts becoming one. I still hear people say that if you love someone too much or focus on them too hard, you’re making them into an idol. Where did that kind of lie come from? Like I need to ask. When your body died—because I know you’re very much alive—and we were wrenched away from each other, half of me was gone. Katy told people we were bleeding out. Absolutely accurate. There’s no way to prepare for that.

And there’s no good reason to feel guilty about it. With all our failures and faults and frailties, you and I became one, the way sugar and tea, dissolved into a new creation, become sweet tea. Or this— “A cord of three strands is not easily broken.” Losing you was a shock to my system that has taken over a year just to wake up from. Shock does that to you. But I’ve stayed active. Reached out to friends. Paid my bills. Put on makeup every day. All the things. But now it feels as though the anesthesia is wearing off and throbbing pain is what I live with daily as I go forward. Slowly forward, but forward without you nonetheless.

I had another fight with you last night. I guess you know that. I can hear you laughing at the absurdity of it the way you always did, even as I type this. That makes me smile. God, you were so adorable. I could never stay mad at you. I was describing the way you kept things to yourself. Things I wished you’d shared with me. It would have made me feel like I was a partner in all you faced if, for example, you’d let me help you study during fire school the way other wives helped their husbands. Or if I’d learned about your hair-raising shifts from you instead of learning about the close calls while you described them to our friends. You didn’t want to worry me, you said. I recognize that you were trying to protect me. But protecting me kept me in the dark.  I told you everything I ever thought about, described ad nauseum every event I experienced. Don’t deny it—I saw your eyes glaze over. I needed to be included by you in a way you weren’t able to do. Maybe that’s a guy thing. You don’t give details, you summarize. But friendship is a two-way street. This is probably something we should have handled while you were here in the flesh, but we weren’t good at that either. You hate conflict and I hate fighting alone.

So, I guess it wasn’t all that weird that I fought alone with you last night, telling you all of this, wishing we’d handled it while we had the chance, and recognizing that we did the best we could between our differing personalities, upbringings, and points of view. We were imperfect in every way, and perfectly suited for one another. Maybe that’s why you loved that song so much . . “Cause all of me loves all of you . . . all your perfect imperfections. . . ”

One of the miserable things I’ve dealt with this last year is all the rehashing and second guessing that’s so easy to drown in as I look back on our life together. The memories were stunted for a while, you know. Letting them resurface was too much for me for a long time. But now I can handle more of them and the pain that often accompanies them. Still, this Book of Rob and Eula is closed. All that’s left is the epilogue where I cross over to the other side and join you. So, I keep re-reading the novel we “wrote” together because there are no more pages to be added, wishing some chapters had turned out differently. If I’d changed that response or sacrificed that desire or trusted you better, what would that have looked like and why didn’t I do it? And why didn’t we communicate better before we lost that gift permanently?

The Cliff Notes of our novel could be reduced to one word if I allowed it—“Why?” But I won't. I think all the "why's" suggest that perfection is attainable, when it's not. And that’s the way our fight ended last night, with the recognition that you and I were human. We came into marriage as imperfect humans who simply loved one another and were willing to give marriage our best shot, warts and all. Expecting you to be perfect, expecting perfection from myself, these unrealistic expectations steal forgiveness and acceptance. Worse, they’re a setup for being fake. Inauthentic. Maybe now more than ever, I need to recognize that and let myself off the hook. You never pretended that I was perfect. You accepted me fully and loved me to your core. I did the same for you, although I’ll admit I sometimes called you Roby Poppins (because you were “practically perfect in every way.”)

So, maybe those dimes show up not only to remind me to pay attention in the moment and trust my instincts, but also as an invitation to talk with you still, even in spirit, about what it takes to survive the loss of you, my love. Maybe this is one way you’re able to help me get through this. “A penny for your thoughts,” the saying goes. Mine must be worth more than that or you wouldn’t keep paying me for them.

A dime for your thoughts, I hear you say. Keep dropping that spare change, Baby. I’ll keep talking. 

Avoidance

I don’t think this is going to help. Writing. Draining off all the ache with tears welling up in my eyes, dripping off my cheeks and splattering on my shirt. Thirteen months. Two days. Barely into the second year of living without Rob and today I’m down.

There’s no reason to call anyone. There’s nothing they can do. Or say. I’m just terribly sad. I don’t want questions about how I got here because I don’t know the answers. The questions make me feel like I could have avoided this if I’d been paying more attention—the way you could have avoided dog doo if you’d been watching where you walk.

I’ve been walking in memories. But I don’t take myself down that path. I just find myself there with no warning. Like a few minutes ago while I scrolled through etsy looking for floating shelves. Suddenly the screen was filled with football team logos instead of barnwood creations and I was transported to the Gators Man Cave wall hanging I ordered for Rob’s birthday five years ago. I haven’t seen it since we moved to the mountains a year and a half ago. But I will. Just as soon as my new house is completed and I finally have to face all the boxed up, bubble wrapped photos and wall art and décor that represent all the happy times when I created a refuge for Rob and I that looked like us.

Now I’m creating a respite for myself devoid of my husband. There’s no man cave. There’s no us. There are three storage units filled with memories I haven’t seen in over a year, and I fear them all. Friends are already offering to help me move everything out of those air-conditioned units and bring them to my new home, but I don’t know if that’s what I will need.

Some people think when you’re thrown into a pit of grief as I’ve been, that the best thing to do is get your mind off your sorrows. You can’t change anything by staring at it. It’s done. Rob’s gone. He’s not coming back. Get on with life. Deal with it. Unpack those boxes and set up your house. Get back to the business of living. Keep the noise going in your mind and all around and those sneaky little memories won’t be able to compete with the commotion. Eventually, they’ll all fade away into what once was while you stay busy creating the new what is. There’s just one problem.

It doesn’t work.

Some people love me so much they suffer watching me do the same. Some people love me so much they want desperately to help me find joy again. Some people love me so much they’d do just about anything to rescue me. But it’s impossible. They can’t rescue me. I can’t even rescue me. The only way through grief is straight through. “There are no shortcuts,” my counselor reminds me from time to time. Grief is a voice of honesty that won’t let me off the hook. It won’t let me ignore its presence forever. Grief is another kind of wisdom that demands to be heard; actually, it deserves to be heard. Grief tells the truth, holds wide its arms, and beckons the heartbroken into its safe embrace where validation of the pain allows its full expression. Grief isn’t trying to destroy me. It’s not trying to imprison me. It’s trying to heal my broken heart so I can find my way back to the living we all want for me.

So. Those boxes. I have to face them soon. I have to open them in front of other people because there are too many of them for me to move or sort through alone. I have to allow the emotion to surface because I don’t have the space in my soul to shove all of that down. This feels so scary. It makes me feel vulnerable. It lays open my pain again to the observation and possible scrutiny of others, even though they love me. There’s no way around it. The only path to recovery is the one that goes through the suffering.

So, I’ll go through it. I’ll admit my humanity. I’ll probably weep at the opening of all those Pandora’s Boxes overflowing from a lifetime of love with a man I desperately miss. And perhaps, maybe, hopefully, after I baptize all of those precious possessions with these honest tears, I’ll find peace.

It’s worth trying. And honestly, I have no other choice.

Paradox

Hope is hard, she said. And I agreed. Just like love, hope costs us something. Perhaps it costs us control. Or puts us at risk of looking foolish. Or being disappointed. Who can say for sure why we hesitate sometimes to hope.

Unless we’ve hoped before and had our hopes crushed.

A distant melody ran across my mind as I thought about all of this today. It was from an old album Rob and I used to love when we were newly married. “Faith is the confidence of things we hope for, being certain of . . .” I couldn’t remember the rest of the words.

Google to the rescue.

Of course, the lyricists took liberties with the phrasing, but since translators frequently do the same thing, it didn’t matter. Find your favorite translation and take your pick.

·         “Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance of what we do not see.”   Or . . .

·         “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the proving of things not seen.” Or . . .

·         “Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things we cannot see.”

And so on. Hope, then, is a paradox. And my weary brain is too tired to rely on a paradox to help me see in the dark.

You see, I’m in the dark again. I loved and lost . . . again. My beloved dog, Brody, not yet six years old, had to be put down tonight because he was overcome by an illness so mysterious it left four vets shaking their heads. “We’re stumped,” they each said as I wrote out enormous checks in exchange for their confusion. Though I was encouraged to seek out specialists, Brody was fading fast and I couldn’t do it. I knew in my gut he was never going to get better. He knew it, too, and did all he could to make it clear to us that this was his time.

I found my heart crying out the same words I cried out almost one year ago to the day when I lost Rob. “It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way!” But heaven was silent again. The circle of life spins whether we like it or not, I’m told, and we lost when we desperately wanted to win.

The vet came tonight to our home and one by one we each loved on my broken pup and said goodbye. I looked for a sign that Rob was close all afternoon and through the evening until darkness fell and the vet’s truck drove off with Brody’s body. But while I sensed Rob was near, there was no sign. Throughout the whole ordeal, I whispered to him where he lives somewhere on the other side of a thin veil, “Please come get Brody.” And to our Creator who knows every hair that surrenders to a tile floor and every sparrow which falls from the sky, “When Brody passes, please let Rob come get him.”

The grands and I had spent the day talking about how Brody would be with Rob and would be able to jump and run with the joy he always had until he got sick. Jules said, “He’ll probably run right between Chief and Jesus’ legs!” And we laughed at the image, holding it close in the next hours when faith was eclipsed by sorrow and pain once more. “Please come get him, Rob,” I whispered into the wind again.

Alone in my room tonight, I began going through the photos and videos I’ve kept of Brody for the last six years. It was so hard to see his tail down this week. To watch him stumble into walls and get stuck behind table legs. To know he wasn’t eating or drinking and to note the absence of a spark in his half-closed eyes. Even though it was late, I needed to see him healthy again before I turn out the lights on this awful day. I gathered over a hundred photos into a new album I made on my phone. And even though my exhausted phone kept insisting it was about to run out of juice, I kept scrolling and saving. Suddenly, I stopped short. “Oh, my God,” I said out loud, as the tears welled up in my eyes.

There’s a photo of Rob and Brody in the snow that I took in 2019. It’s one of my favorites of the two of them and it’s been my screensaver ever since I took it. I’m always worrying that I’ll accidently replace it with a different picture, so a couple of years ago I decided to find the original and make another copy of it.

But I couldn’t find it.

It was nowhere on my phone. I found the photo taken right before the one I was searching for, but the original of my screen saver was gone. Vanished. I’ve looked over and over again, but it was nowhere to be found. I finally took a screenshot of my screensaver, complete with an intrusive app that I couldn’t remove, just so I’d have some kind of backup.

Tonight, as I scrolled and saved photos of our wonderful, loving pup, the missing photo suddenly was back in place. It’s not the poser/substitute shot with the unwelcome app that I created a couple of years ago. It’s the pristine original photo of Rob smiling in the snow, his hands firmly holding onto the lead of a healthy, happy Brody.

And I knew.

Rob knew the significance of that long-missing photo. And when I saw it reappear on my phone, tonight, after I’d spent the day asking Rob to come for our dog, I knew that’s exactly what he did. I knew exactly what he was trying to tell me. They're together again and Brody is fine once more. I’ve learned by now, after over a year missing my husband, that from heaven our loved ones know what we’re going through. They pray for us. They send us signs that they’re alive and aware. And they’re the first ones to welcome emancipated souls when they arrive.

Including beloved pets like our Brody.

I sent an immediate email to a friend who had assured me Rob would send me a sign today. Then I glanced at the other two windows still open on my laptop from my earlier google search. “Faith is the confidence that what we hope for . . .” one of them read, while the other echoed its words.

“And this hope will not lead to disappointment,” the New Living Translation reads in Romans 5:5. “For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love.”

He cares. He even cares about happy white dogs and broken hearts left behind. He cares enough to send a photo of my two beloveds together again, an answer to my prayers, so I can sleep in peace tonight.

Maybe faith isn’t just a paradox. And maybe hope is worth another try.