I’m writing this post about three weeks ago because I’m not sure if I’ll feel like writing now. Today is the first anniversary of the beginning of my new normal, the morning when I was reading Bible passages to Red as she made the transition to the next life.
That was the day I finally understood all the obituaries I’ve seen where someone very old or very sick “died unexpectedly.” I knew she had terminal lymphoma, I knew she was in a hospice bed, I even knew she was showing all of the signs of a quiet dying, but I still was surprised when I realized she had stopped breathing. It was as if I never saw it coming.
When people ask, I say I’m doing OK, and I am, but the hole in your life never really goes away; you just fill it as best you can and move on, because life goes on even if, at first, you can’t imagine how. She has been an essential part of who I am for 27 years, and that never changes. Eventually you start to laugh again and the memories ache but do not debilitate.
I took two photos on June 27, 2023.
The first is of her nightstand 45 minutes later, three feet from where she lay. There are her glasses, the pad and pen on which she was recording her medications and thoughts, the portable fan the Milwaukee hospital gave her from her visit there, and flowers from a friend, losing a petal or two.
The other photo was from that afternoon, when I took the dogs home from being boarded the night before, because I wasn’t going to leave her side that night. Our beloved echinacea flowers had been on the verge of blooming when I took Summer and Dejah to the doggie hotel, and when we got home the first coneflower of the season had burst, the most beautifully perfect echinacea I have ever seen. It felt like she was saying, “I’ve arrived, it’s lovely here, don’t worry about me, the flowers here are this perfect.”
A dear friend told me that in her own parents’ native Germany — also the land of my father’s parents — the “official” mourning period is a full year, so my time of mourning is now over, “officially.” That doesn’t mean, of course, that I won’t find something in a drawer or a long-unopened box, or think to tell her something when I get home and then remember, or hear a certain song, and feel the loss all over again.
But the feeling will pass in a moment, and I will return to the tasks at hand, thanking God for another reminder of how blessed I was for a quarter of a century.
How blessed we all were to have known her