Here We Are Again

I’ve talked myself out of posting this at least a dozen times. I told a close friend that no one would want to read it. Until I landed here, I wouldn’t have wanted to. I would have protected my soul from any reminder that someone else’s heartache could someday become mine, too. They don’t make Hallmark cards with sentiments like that in them. And for good reason.

“I’d read your post,” she said. It humbled me. Sometimes I forget there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

Rob and I were married in 1976. I was eighteen, he was twenty-three. We’d been separated for nearly eighteen months while he completed his hitch with the Air Force in another country and I finished high school in this one. We always said it was a test of our relationship, both of us being so young when we got engaged. And we made it through with flying colors. He’d barely been back in the states for two weeks when we tied the knot and began this adventure called marriage.

Tomorrow would have been our Fiftieth Anniversary. In a holy, spiritual kind of way, it still is. I know Rob is still very much alive, and that it’s right to say he’s far more alive now than he ever was here despite the gaping hole his absence has created in all our lives, especially mine. He knows the significance of this date.

We would have made it again. And we would have exceeded fifty years together. Maybe that benchmark mattered to me because other family members set an example of long, enduring marriages when their golden wedding anniversaries rolled around. I looked forward to that in our story. Among our many long-time friends, Rob and I are the only ones who didn’t reach this special anniversary. I’m left here to remember it without him beside me.

There will be no parties. No congratulations. I don’t think those go out to members of the Widow’s Club. Only our children and a few longtime friends will comment on the day that didn’t turn out the way we had hoped. They will show me a great deal of love and kindness, as they are so kind to do. But it’s an awkward anniversary this year. I guess it’s a good thing Rob and I celebrated in a big way on our fortieth. That one will have to stand in for the one stolen from us by a virus.

We’ve been separated from one another for five and a half years at this point. By now I’m supposed to have learned to count my blessings, practice gratitude, reframe my thoughts, find meaning, and trust God. It’s exhausting to say the least. Remembering how crushed I was for the first year and how disappointed in God I was back then, I’m calling it a big win that of all the positive advice offered to me by therapists and books and others, the one thing I ended up leaning into with all of who I am was relying on God again. 

His presence has held and sustained me like nothing else could.

It’s not that I don’t recognize all the ways I’ve been blessed. I do. But I don’t “practice gratitude” in daily journals or make that my goal because it feels like denial. I won’t make it through the slog of grief if I deny that I’m walking there. I can’t tell you how many times a day I tell Jesus “Thank you” for keeping His promise to never leave me or let me down regardless of how sucky my attitude is along the way. He simply keeps holding me tight. I know He is with me every step of this journey I’m on, and He’s not offended by anything I feel or say to Him.

I know. I didn’t hear that in Sunday School either.

I also don’t try to reframe my thoughts, as though I'm widowing wrong. I don’t know how long my grief will last, but apparently it’s contingent upon how long I’ve loved Rob. Sounds fairly permanent to me. As another widow recently wrote, "I am an actual person living an actual life after an actual loss. There is a hole in my life that will never disappear. I am learning to live with that."

People in grief circles talk a lot about honoring their person when holidays or special dates roll around. That’s another thing, and I’m sure this will surprise you, that I see differently. By now you have an entirely better idea of what a saint Rob was and still is. I don’t fit into anyone’s box, no matter how much I’ve tried to. The idea of honoring someone who has died can look like making their favorite meal or finding a way to serve others or even spending the day in isolation. I’m told that whatever is right for you is what you should do, and I’m not making fun of anything that brings comfort to others who grieve.

But somehow none of it is right for me.

I spent my entire life honoring and respecting my husband. I knew from day one how lucky I was to be loved by him, chosen by him to share his life, and to get to share my life with him. Grieving the loss of him and our life together cannot be called anything else except honor. 

But I don’t like his favorite dessert, pumpkin pie, so I’m not going to eat it on his birthday. I’m not setting an extra plate at the table in front of an empty chair and calling that honor at Christmas. I know some do, but I don’t. It doesn’t comfort me. It would feel weird and make me cry more than I already do. And I’m not serving meals to the homeless in his honor because there’s barely one servant bone in my body and I don’t like doing stuff like that, even though I know he would have been the first one in the kitchen and the last one out.

See what I mean by how lucky I was that a man as wonderful as Rob McLeod loved a woman so flawed as I am?

I've tried to come up with a way to signify this special date on my own, though. I thought about going through all our photos and putting together one enormous album to display our love story chronologically. And then I started crying at the thought of creating an emotional project like that on such short notice. Almost all my photo albums are still in storage and decades of pictures are on a couple of hard drives that, for all I know and am afraid to find out, might be corrupted and inaccessible.

I tossed that idea in the circular file where it belongs.

Then I thought about driving across town tomorrow to the little Baptist church where we were married. Maybe bring my daughter or a grandchild with me and show them the spot where our love story began. After all, that’s where we met. But it’s not the same building anymore. They renovated it more than forty years ago. It looks completely different now, no one there knows who I am or who Rob was, and I hate going to the west side of Phoenix anyway.

Buildings, just like circumstances and people, change.

I thought about buying myself an anniversary ring with a lovely diamond. But to be honest, if I’m going to spend that kind of money, what I really need is a recliner that doesn’t hurt my back.

In the end, the only way I could think to honor Rob on this particular anniversary would be to write about him in a blog. You know, one of those mature sounding pieces that makes me look like a shining example of Christian fortitude. A godly, happy widow, grateful for all the years we did have together, who would never question God. 

Or, I could simply be honest and tell the truth. 

I’d tell you all the wonderful things I love about Rob McLeod. Like the way he always looked at me with love in his eyes—unless I pushed his insurmountable patience to the extreme which I did more often than you might think. Or I might tell you how respected he was by every firefighter and staff member he ever worked with, although one or two had the bad taste to be narcissists, and they don’t like anyone except themselves.

I could tell you how much he loved Jesus, or how often I told Rob that he was my hero and that when I grow up someday I want to be just like him. He was the bravest man I’ve ever known and the most sacrificial. “I could stand on my head for two weeks if I had to,” he often said, and it wasn’t hyperbole. I, however, wouldn’t do that for two seconds. Not for anyone, not for any reason.  I would pray for them, but I wouldn't stand on my head for them. 

He was also the adventurous one of the two of us. He started his fire career all over again here in Arizona for me. It still makes me cry to remember his sacrifice there. He meant it when he told me he could be happy anywhere. I have tons of stories about the camping trips we took together and how not a single one of them ended without some kind of catastrophe. And yet we kept on camping. I didn’t mind it as long as he was there. He inspired our children to be themselves and love their lives. They do, and they adored their father.

Or I could tell you how much he hated it when I beat him at Scrabble and how, to this day, I still can’t figure out how he always beat me at Spades. You might not know this, but Rob loved to write poetry. Don’t feel bad. I never realized that either, even though I was the recipient of most of his poems. I thought he wrote poems to me for our anniversaries and other special dates because, like most husbands, he didn’t make it to the store in time to buy me a card.

Looking back, I realize how much I missed about who he was.

I could tell you how hard he worked, how peacefully he slept, what a big Gators fan he was, and that no matter how long we lived in the desert he never dusted Florida's white sugar sand from his feet. He was a Florida boy through and through. Still, he loved Arizona’s mountains.

He held me when I was scared or cried, and joked that he was going to get a sponge surgically implanted in his shoulder. He loved Christmas and real trees and didn’t mind giving up his man card to sit through Hallmark movies with me. He once worked in a movie theatre and he loved watching movies. His favorite at Christmas was always A Christmas Carol with George C. Scott. His favorite war movie was Patton with George C. Scott. His favorite movie star was George C. Scott. Apparently.

He did four years with the Air Force and got out because he got married. To me. But if he hadn’t married me and got out anyway, he told me he would have become either a mercenary or a monk. So, I either saved the world or robbed it. It’s hard to say. But this year I finally found the courage to bring out his folded American flag and display it in my living room. It’s been five years since they gave it to me. It hurts a little less to see it now.

He took up calligraphy when he retired and a few months after we lost him, my granddaughter found a piece of artwork he’d practiced penning for me. I framed it and now it hangs in my bedroom, one more handwritten poem that he left behind. On the days when I miss him so much, and after a growing absence where I question if he was really here, I see it on my wall and know that he was. His handwriting, recognizable even in calligraphy, reads, “Eula – My Love, My Life, My All.”

Those are just a few of the things I would write if I had the heart and stamina to do so. That’s what I would tell you about the man I married. I would put all of those thoughts into a long, long post and upload it in honor of our golden anniversary this month.

But I can’t write a blog like that because there aren’t enough Kleenex in Walmart to help me get through it.

All I know is this: I’d give anything to have one more hug from him. I’d give up the remote and learn to read a book beside him while he watched the Gators play football to his heart’s content. I wouldn’t make him stop biting his nails while he did it, either. I wouldn’t grumble at him to organize his desk or the garage. I’d sit outside in the heat and watch him mow the yard while I thanked God for the privilege of just being near him. I’d even weep with joy to see his sweaty ballcap tossed carelessly on the kitchen counter where I prep food for dinner.

And would it be asking too much to hear him tell me one more time that he loves me?

Tears flow on the regular because I miss him. They flow because of all the things I overlooked for forty-four years while I naïvely believed we had another forty years ahead of us. They flow because of the future that was stolen from us. And because we never got to have any final conversations due to the circumstances surrounding his death.

And they keep flowing because my love for him is still a river.

Here we are, separated again. Not forever, thanks be to God, but for longer than I wish. And I’ll be thinking of him and of us on our fiftieth, just like I do every September 25^th.

Happy Anniversary to my darlin’. I love you, baby.

It was the honor of my life to be your wife.