You should still be here, Baby.
Lee texted me today to ask how I am. I’m sad this
year, missing you so much, all amplified on this special day that I’ll bet you
don’t even think about now that you’re in heaven. There’s no time there. Whenever
I show up at last, whether in five years or another twenty-five, I’m confident it
will seem to you as if I was right behind you when you walked through those
celestial gates. No time lost.
Not from my perspective, though. Not right now. Time is the
enemy here because it keeps me from being with you.
I don’t usually write letters to you on our special days. They make me cry even more than I already am. I don’t plan anything on those dates except sharing a toast with our kids and my sister every February 19. We pour shots of your favorite whiskey, Talisker from the Isle of Skye, the land of your ancestors. I don’t even like whiskey, but I take a sip anyway on that date, surrounded in person and on zoom by our family. I try to act casual when I do it, but you know me. It goes down hard and I come up coughing. It always made you laugh.
I miss your laughter.
I talked to Laura recently about this unique kind
of loneliness I experience in your absence. It’s a loneliness no one can fill
because no one else is you. I talk to people, spending time with them. I hug
our kids and grands and friends and others in the family. But then I come home alone
and you’re nowhere to be found. You’re not here to share small talk with. To
listen to me whine and worry. You’re not here to laugh at my fears and bring me
back to reality. Laura said I can call her up anytime and she’ll laugh at me on
your behalf. Which made us both laugh, thinking of your famous smirk and how it
always snapped me out of my melancholy.
I miss your smirk.
This is the fourth birthday you’ve spent with Jesus
instead of blowing out candles here with us. It surprises people when I tell
them how long you’ve been gone, but I’ve felt every second of it. I don’t even
want to do the math on that one. By the time I did the calculations I’d already
have them wrong. Time keeps ticking away, doesn’t it?
I’ve read lots of suggestions on how to honor you in
your absence on days like this. Things like making your favorite meal and
setting a place for you at the table while I eat. Sounds awful, doesn’t it? And
kind of creepy. But I can’t help remembering how much you enjoyed my homemade
salsa. How you bragged about the pies I learned to make simply because I found
out you prefer pie over cake. I almost bought a pumpkin muffin at Starbucks
today because you loved those fall flavors, but it was as if you reassured me
while I sat in the drive thru that you’d still feel honored if I bought
something I enjoy instead of eating something I don’t simply to celebrate you.
We always liked going through Starbucks together, so I ordered my chocolate
frou-frou drink and toasted you as if you were sitting beside me in our truck.
Maybe you were.
And now I’m sitting in my office, the one you’ve
never seen, near a photo of you in your fire helmet. It sits on top of a bookshelf, beside the helmet itself. It means more to me than the two flags I
was given after your memorials. I know the flags honored your military and fire
service, but since they didn’t give them to you but rather to me, they’re too
much a reminder that you had to die for me to receive them. I think that’s wrong. You
earned them. They should have given them to you while you were alive. They're no substitute for you anyway. But your fire helmet? I saw you
wear that. It reminds me that you were here.
Sometimes I need to be reminded that you were really
here.
I talk to a lot of widows these days. Some of them
in person, others by email or online. We all have different stories of loss and
life. We’re scattered all over the world in differing cultures and countries.
But when we talk about living without our husbands, a life we never wanted and
did not choose, we speak the same language and share the same experiences.
Grief, it turns out, levels the ground beneath our feet. And all of us feel as if
we are floating away from the life we once lived, alone on a piece of ice that
broke away from the mainland.
You were my home, my mainland.
Days like today are reminders of what I’ve lost. I
know what I had. I’m grateful to have been loved by you, treasured and
cherished by you. Gratitude isn’t the problem. It’s also not the solution.
Honoring you is something I do every day of my life as I continue to love you
with all my heart and miss you as if I’d lost my own heart.
Which is exactly what happened.
Robin gave me a card recently. It’s astonishing. She
bought one for herself that she keeps on her dresser. It reminds her to pray for me, she said. Robin is the Minister of
Cards, and she picks out some that are amazing and sends them to me often. In this one, a young woman in a denim skirt sits on a rocky outcropping, staring off across a vast valley painted in velvety greens with blue-gray peaks in the background. She looks like a young version of me. We both
recognized it. But I never posed for that photo except maybe from a distance,
in my soul, where only you and God and Robin can see.
I think the girl in the picture is waiting,
watching, looking for someone.
The way I wait for you.
Today is your seventy-first birthday, Baby. I hope
they celebrated you like crazy in heaven. I hope you played golf with your dad
and hunted gators with your brother, Rick, and let Randy win at Monopoly. You know how
mad he gets when he loses.
And I hope you really were sitting beside me in the
truck when I drove through Starbucks today, knowing how much I love you and
miss you. I hope you feel honored and celebrated by your family and me as Lee and Katy and all our family remember you in our own special ways. You
were our whole world.
