Thank You

Sorry for being gone for a while. I have been occupied with traveling back to GA and SC last week to see friends (which was much needed and good for me) and a visit this week from our friend Nancy from back home (also much needed and very good for me). Next weekend my sister Amanda and her husband will arrive for a visit which I am really looking forward to.

So how am I doing? Well, the season of big events I had been dreading has commenced. So far, I have made it through both of our birthdays. How did it go?

I got through Kirk’s birthday as well as can be expected. For those who don’t know, I went back home to family and friends, and we had a get together to remember him. Friends in at least two other states also celebrated him that day – some even had birthday candles. The day was up and down for me. I went to the cemetery in the morning to have a visit and say happy birthday. I lay down with him like always. I talked some of the time, and lay quietly the rest of the time. I feel close to him there – sad but close. I decided that the topic of the day would be to tell him what I would have told him before he died if I had had the chance. All the way there, I thought about what I would say, and there was so much I couldn’t keep it all in my head. When I got there, I spread my blanket on the ground, laid down with him, and tried to organize it in my mind so I could say it out loud. All of a sudden, it was clear. It was “Thank you.”

Thank you for loving me beyond all reason. For giving me two beautiful children that I am so proud of and so happy to have for mine. For making me laugh every single day. For making me feel good about myself and for making me feel capable and confident. For not just loving me, but for telling and showing the world how much you loved me. For being my shower lifeguard so I could get clean without fear of drowning. For being proud of me and for being someone I could be proud of too. For being so delighted about life and seeing so much humor in the world that you made the rest of us feel and see it too.

Thank you for being my partner, not just my housemate. For working so long and hard to take care of us. For being romantic, like the time you kept sending me anonymous cards and gifts pretending to be a secret admirer until I got scared cause I thought they were from a crazy stalker. For taking me seriously, while making sure I didn’t take myself too seriously. For all the flowers you bought for no reason except to make me happy, most especially the ones you sent the day before you died. For being so delighted when I came home every day, and for waking up every morning when I left to say “Take a banana, drive carefully, I love you.”

Thank you for taking care of me when I got sick, for letting me sleep late all those weekends, for knowing when I needed comfort food. For reaching for my hand every time we walked together for all thirty years. For still being attracted to me, no matter how much weight I gained or how much older I got, and always saying (and meaning) that I was gorgeous, even when I clearly wasn’t. For setting such a good example for the kids, for being clear about right and wrong, for teaching them how to treat people. For surprising me so much and making every day new. For the “Welcome Back!!” sign you made for me after I left the room for only 10 minutes.

Thank you for sticking with me and fighting for me in the early years when sometimes I thought maybe we had made a mistake. For the secret and romantic Christmas gift you gave me a few years ago that I am not allowed to tell anyone about, that you didn’t want to give me, but you knew I wanted so much, so you bought it anyway just to make me happy. For not being perfect, but being perfect for me. For silently taking my hand and pulling me out of a chair to dance with you whenever “You Look Wonderful Tonight” came on. For changing – keeping and growing the best parts of you as you matured, and leaving the not so good parts behind. Thank you for being mine.

I know he knew while he was alive that I appreciated him, but I’m not so sure he knew just what for, or exactly how much. I hope he always felt it even though I didn’t spell it out the way I wish I had. I hope he heard me on his birthday. I know I didn’t say it exactly the way I just wrote it. Mostly I just said “thank you” over and over because the list is far too long to articulate. Hopefully he can fill in the blanks.

I also cleaned the stone that day. At the beginning of the visit, I left the cleaning stuff in the car, and went down the hill for my visit with him. Near the end of my visit, I got up to walk back up the hill to the car to get what I needed. I saw that while I had been laying with him, two men – one much older than me, and one about my age - had arrived and were visiting a new gravesite across the path. I think they were father and son, visiting a woman who must have been the older man’s wife. The son was clearly supporting the father, physically and emotionally – holding his dad’s arm as he walked, hugging him while his dad cried, fastening his dad’s coat. It made me cry – partly because I was sad they had lost their wife and mother, but also overwhelmingly sad for me. Seeing the father, much older than me, visiting his wife, hit me like a wall – all I could think is I am TOO YOUNG to be cleaning my husband’s tombstone. No woman my age, married to a man the same age, should be spending his birthday at the cemetery scrubbing grass clippings off of something that tells the world he isn’t there to celebrate.

I did it though. He wouldn’t like for his grave to be messy. Between me, his Dad and Sandy, and Matt, we try to keep it looking nice. It’s the closest we can come to taking care of him now. So I scrubbed the grass off, washed the stone, rinsed and dried it, and filled the bird feeder.

Then I went back to my sister’s house to get ready for the “party.” I made Kirk’s macaroni salad and “hard vegetable” salad, and did a good enough job that they actually tasted like his, which made me happy. My mom made her cheese ball that he loved, my sister Lauren made her appetizers, Matt made a big pot of hot sauce, and we had Zweigle’s hotdogs. The meal was not as elaborate as he would have put on, but it was good all the same, with lots of his staple picnic foods. Everyone came over, and I visited, talked about him, got hugs, and cried on the front porch by myself a couple of times. The best thing was that Kirk’s dad gave me a wonderful gift that day – two memories he had of Kirk that I had not known. The first was how Kirk won the Little League championship for his team as a kid. I had known they won, but never knew before that Kirk made the winning play. The second was that he said that Kirk had told him shortly after he met me that he had met the girl he was going to marry. Thank you, Kirk, for picking me.

Enough for today – I’ll tell you about my birthday another time.