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Early morning autumn sun streaks our wooden deck with strands of gold. The sky is a heavenly shade of blue. In the distance the sumac is turning. Celadon greens becoming burnt orange, barn red, mahogany. The reds stand out, brilliant against a drying, wheat-colored landscape. It is the sumac I remember most. It reminds me of the year my mother died, September 30, 1993, twenty-eight years ago today.
It’s Valentine’s Day. Brilliant sunshine creates shadows on my snow-covered deck. The oaks beyond stretch tall against a sky of powder blue. Frigid cold preserves a snowfall that graces each twig and branch. I am playing Ella Fitzgerald’s version of “My Funny Valentine” and thinking of Bob. I am thinking of how he was my funny valentine. I am thinking of how his humor, so much a part of his vernacular, his take on life buoyed my spirits, caused me to laugh in light times, in dark times. He was an original. I could never reconstruct his random comments, only know they were a gift.
Early this morning, from my bedroom perch I see an anticipatory rim of gold hovering above the tree line. I watch the sun inching higher and higher spreading its rays over a scene just short of heaven. All night while the world slept, five inches of snow fell and mounded and nearly covered autumn trees still thick with unshed leaves, red, burgundy, burnt orange and saffron peeking through. The neighbor’s maple beyond my deck, though heavy laden, gleams gold.
Dearest husband of my heart:
I am assuming you are one of the “great cloud of witnesses” written about in the
book of Hebrews. That you were privy to the ins and outs of the weekend our
beautiful granddaughter Tessa married Luke. That you smiled, and even shared
some of this joy with one of your heavenly friends, or Jesus, perhaps? Or even
that a whole contingency of those who have gone before, who loved us on earth
participated in celebration. Though I cannot know for sure I, still earth-bound, can
assume.
I’ve had a yen for “Special Juice” lately. Maybe it’s that summer has never been complete without it. Perhaps it’s that everything glorious about this late July and early August weather has been particularly “special” as well, given the Polar Vortex, the drenching May and the cold gray June we had this year. What’s more likely is that the “Special Juice” person, aka Bob Carlson is residing in heaven and no one on earth has yet been able to duplicate his perfected recipe, least of all me.
Today is the third anniversary of my husband’s death. His vital spirit departed his earthly body at 12:10 AM, Monday, March 7, 2016. Three years gone like yesterday or three years gone like a lifetime ago. I see his last breaths, long, slow and then stilled. I watch the color fade, feel the warmth diminish. His spirit taking flight. Despite our agony, our profound sadness, it is a Holy time, a thin place, the diaphanous gauze that separates heaven and earth, life and death nearly indistinct.
I keep writing my grief journey because there is more to say. It is January and the days are starkly reminiscent of what it was like three years ago to watch fearfully as my husband of 57 years began to fade before my eyes. The snowstorms, the freezing rains, the pewter skies trigger feelings of anxiety. Winter in the Midwest, cold permeating, many months to go, and me, with a dull dread underlying those months leading up to March 7, 2016.
Today I visit a favorite store in Glen Ellyn. It is a place where Bob bought me jewelry for special occasions, a place where the proprietor “knows my name” and knew his. A place where, when I visited a few weeks after he died, the owner, Margo asked, “and how’s Bob?” When I told her he had died she began to cry, came around the counter and hugged me.
Today I am on a mission. I am on a mission to replace the last gift he bought me on Valentine’s Day 2016. He bought it three weeks before he passed to heaven.The gift is a beautiful bracelet with semi-precious stones of variable colors and designs, linked with silver so that it hangs loosely on my wrist. He writes a Valentine message in an accompanying card which I keep in my Bible. I wear the bracelet every day. And every night I take it off with my watch and place it on the cherry red velvet seat of an antique chair in my bedroom, ready to be worn the next day.
The cemetery is familiar territory. A solemn respite in Midwestern environs. A family plot. A place where a young sibling, both parents and my husband’s earthly remains reside. We gather in scattered twos and threes. A stone urn our focal point. Early morning sun gleams gold, long rays streaking turf. We shiver for autumn chill penetrates. We are here for Pat, oldest Carlson sibling. “The smartest one” who lost her daunting mental capacity a little more than three years ago. Whose keen awareness as cognition failed wounded her heart, our hearts. We watched her slip, slip away.
