A New Story

“When you and I met, the meeting was over shortly; it was nothing.  Now it is  growing as we remember it.  What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what our meeting inspires in me all my days ’til then: that is the real meeting.” –CS Lewis

I would ask John to tell me the story of how we met because I loved hearing him tell it.

There’s a feeling I get whenever I’m hearing or reading something profound; it’s a feeling that is only brought out through direct contact with the words; almost like the friction from a match right before the flame appears. There are moments in life that feel like that too: they hold us transfixed, almost in a sort of pleasure when we recollect or share them with others. Those are the good moments nestled within the good stories that allow us to breathe a little easier.

Hearing him tell the story of us meeting was like that for me.

How we met was such a chance encounter that I would refer to it as almost magical. And the feeling that would come after could only be described as “magic.” There was no other word I could think of to describe what the story of us meeting was.

It wasn’t until I found myself reading JRR Tolkien’s ideas on the difference between “magic” and “enchantment” that I realized I had picked the wrong word to describe what meeting John brought into my life, both when he was alive, and now long after.

Magic, Tolkien believed, is used to bend the reality of this world in order to match our desires.  It is done with the intention to dominate those around us and make them submit to our whims, manifestations, and ultimately, to our will.  

Enchantment on the other hand doesn’t attempt to bend and distort reality.  

Rather, it calls us into another world, leads us away, and weaves us, little by little, into another story. A world connected to the one we were in, yet still all together separate. To enter an enchanted world is not an act of our will, but rather a submission of it to another’s.

Enchantment involves a choice.  It is a call which invites us to leave where we are and venture onto another land. 

Unlike magic, whether or not we choose to answer and surrender to that that call is up to us.

In the world of enchantment, if you allow it to do what it wills with you, you somehow become both more and less of yourself at the same time as you are cross-stitched into a reality inhabited by all the stories, histories, and myths that came long before. 

Enchantment takes the story of John and I out of this common world of space and time and life and death and places it on higher ground into a world of “story” itself. The world where all good stories begin.  

There, he and I are no longer two people who met one another seven years ago; he is no longer someone who died two years after that or someone whom I have grieved ever since. 

In the enchanted world our story didn’t start seven years ago: It started the very first time a young man and a young woman ever caught one another’s eyes in the middle of a crowded room and felt the whole world around them disappear. It started the first time two people fought the odds, fought expectations, and fought the world as they knew it in order to be together.

We become an extension of every couple who ever gave up “land and title” for love and of  every person who ever charged the gates of the underworld in an attempt to grasp a loved one’s hand just one more time.  We become characters in a story where fiction and fact battle it out and leave people wondering what is true, what is exaggeration, and what is the fantasy of a grieving mind.  

So it wasn’t magic after all that our story contained. And telling it does not reshape the fundamental reality of a world which I still inhabit yet he does not.

If I did have the power to reshape it, I would have willed our story to conclude with “and they lived happily ever after.”  I would have willed us both long lives free of disease and discomfort. And I would have willed that for the rest of my life, I would get exactly what I want when and how I wanted it.

I don’t though. 

And I thank God for that now because that ending, though it would have been a fine one,  would have been confined by the limits of my own mind and imagination. It would have been an altogether different story, and though it would have been a longer one, I’m not sure if it would hold the same level of transfixion.

When he lived, I loved our story, but after he died, I couldn’t find it within myself to love or even understand the story of what would come after.

So I clung to our old stories and revisited them over and over, lighting match after match without knowing what to do with the few seconds of flickering flame that followed. It was only when I let the sparks do what they willed that I found they lit a way to enchanted places.

So I have followed them and allowed myself to be enchanted by the story of “what came after” instead because that is the story that called me from a death-scorched Earth into an upside down kingdom where graves are hallowed and all good stories go.  I have allowed what I cannot love here to enchant and mystify me there instead. 

And maybe one day I will be led to a place where we get to live and rest in that profound feeling which only comes when something worth being said is being said well. And I will re-meet John and we will remember one another in a new way. And instead of asking him to tell me the story of how we met, I will be the one with a good story he will ask me to tell.

And I will tell it.

I will tell him a new story, this story, of all that came after.

The Last Five Years

“Things might have been different, but they could not have been better.”
JRR Tolkien

There’s a recurring dream I have where, in a panic, I am searching for you.

These dreams are unlike the rest.  Some dreams have felt like a visitation; these ones though, these take on a different kind of texture: a rougher one. 

There’s a tension and a static in them, and I wake up more in a state of anxiety than peace.  

In the last five years, I have learned that these stress dreams are common among grievers.  

Apparently, many of us search for our loved ones in the only place where we can meet our thoughts on their own terms: in our sleep.  And sometimes,  we actually find our loved ones hidden in a deep recess of our dream world. 

In the last five years, I have found you, held you, and woken up time and time again clinging to pieces of you that I ripped from dreams.

I never know what to expect during these encounters: Sometimes, I see you from a distance.  Other times, you are up close and offer explanations for why you’ve been gone for so long.  

There are a few times where the version of you I find is angry and wants to be left alone.  

My friend thinks this happens because our human minds are never able to process and accept losing someone to death.  After five years, I have to say that I think he is right.  Though everyone is, in a sense, made to die, I don’t think we were made to be left behind.  I just don’t think humans are cut out for that kind of separation from one another. 

If it wasn’t for the fact that the five years I’ve spent mourning you are somehow still better years than the ones I had before I met you, I don’t think I would have been able to put one foot in front of the other. I certainly would not have gotten through that first year and been able to take those initial steps or breaths in a world in which you didn’t exist anymore.

The last five years have shown me that there’s a hidden power in that paradox: that the same love which can unmake us also can sustain us.  I can’t figure out if it’s the most beautiful or most tragic part of being human.

On those mornings where I find myself being pulled from a dream-world where you still exist into this world where you do not, I struggle to remember the details of this life: the one I have lived in the half decade since you died. On those mornings, my real life is the one that feels surreal.

Sometimes, I have to recite the names of friends and memories and experiences like they’re the beads on a rosary.

It’s like a litany of the years: All the new people and moments that have mattered, that have helped me. All the ways I have changed more into the image of the person you always saw when you looked at me.

I list the people you never met, places you didn’t get to go, the plans I have coming up, and I call myself back into this life.  

Nothing is too big or too small to mention:  I remind myself about the coffee date I have next week with a friend.  The workout I did yesterday where I felt my legs giving out and my lungs exploding.  The conversation I had at work with a colleague.  The phone date I’m supposed to have with my friend next Saturday morning.  

And then I say your name and tell you “good morning.”

Five years later, I still see you in dreams, and I still speak to you when I wake up. 

I still tell you things.   

I guess this is why some people think that all these years later I have lost my mind.

If I’m perfectly honest: they’re right. I did lose it.  

In the years since your accident, I have felt my entire mind and all my ways of thinking and all of my assumptions and all of my beliefs shatter and shake and slip away.  All that I had built for myself was lost when you were.  

Even my mind.  

What good would it have done me to have kept it?  

What good would it have done to have kept a mind that believed I was strong enough to overcome anything life threw at me. Even you were wrong about how strong I was; you told me once that I would always come back stronger in the face of hardship. Well, I didn’t. Not in the face of this.

There was no getting up from this.  

I know you couldn’t have known that when you were alive; there was no way you could have known that you would be the key to my undoing.  Or that I’d lose my mind after you.  That I was nowhere near as strong as you believed.  

The five years have shown me that you were wrong about me.

But you also had always told me I had a good heart. I never really knew what you meant, but I think I do now. In the last five years I have seen that my heart, though it wasn’t always in the right place when you knew me, still did what hearts were made to do…to love beyond themselves.

So you were right about me too.

Once again, there’s a power in that paradox somewhere, but it’s one that, five years later, I still struggle to put into words.

On “Being Ready” to Date Again 

After your partner dies, there’s many things your friends and family worry about as they watch you attempt to navigate your way through grief.  

At first, many of the check-in questions revolve around the basics of survival, and anyone who has ever lost someone fields questions like these every week:

Have you eaten?  

Are you sleeping okay?

Do you need a glass of water?

As time moves on and as healing begins to settle in, the questions naturally begin to evolve, morph, and match the shape of your new life.  People may ask how therapy is going.  If you’ve settled back into work.  What plans, if any, do you have for the future:  are you moving?  Are you traveling?  Going to write a book?   Start a foundation? 

Once again, these questions are pretty standard.  

Whether you’ve lost a parent, a partner, a sibling, or a friend, you ready yourself with prepackaged answers for people’s queries. 

The questions we are asked as we grieve, though well meaning, sometimes add an extra layer of exhaustion onto what is already an exhausting process  because each question comes with the implication that there are things you are “supposed” to either be doing or things you should start doing.  

Now obviously things like eating food or getting sleep are nonnegotiables; even in my heaviest moments of early grief, I could understand that even though I didn’t want to eat, and though I may not have in fact eaten that day…the person who was asking genuinely had my best interest at heart when asked.

No matter who you’ve lost, it’s just part and parcel of grieving: people ask you things.  

But as time marched forward and brought me with it, and after his first year death anniversary passed by, there was one question that began to pop up more and more.  It’s an unassuming one that is unique to partner loss, and  one that many of us spend too much time living under the shadow of:

It’s the question of whether we are ready to start dating or, to be more specific, if we are ready to go out and find love again.  

I’ve been asked this question by friends and family, and I’ve been asked it by men who want to take me out.  

The language of “readiness” is prevalent within the grief community as well.  

I’m about five years out from my loss, and during this past half decade,  I’ve watched countless grievers enter into new romantic relationships at various moments in their journey.  Many of them, when announcing their engagement or marriage,  end up mentioning the time or moment where they knew they were “ready” for the next person. 

And while I can understand the spirit behind the question, “are you ready to date?” I’m really beginning to wonder whether the implications behind it do more harm than good.  

It comes with the assumption that dating is a step someone must take as they move through their  healing; like it’s on the same checklist that drinking water or eating food are. The question of whether someone is ready to date or not adds, in my experience, a completely superfluous expectation onto the already loaded plate of someone as they grieve. 

The question also assumes that dating after loss, like other activities, will be the same as it was before.  Some things, like going to the gym or traveling, feel exactly like they did before he died.  

Other things, like dating, do not.  Not even close.  

I can emphatically say that dating after loss is a completely different ballgame.  That makes sense, as we are completely different people. 

And if I’m being  honest: I really have no idea what I’m meant to be doing or how people do it.  

But I do know that if a griever ends up in a new romantic relationship, it has nothing to do with the fact that they “readied” themselves in some way that myself or others have not.

And to be even more honest, it isn’t so much my own readiness that I have found lacking as much as the readiness of others:  It seems that many people know how to date and enjoy the fruits that grief has brought into my life, but when it comes to tending to the roots of those blessings…they simply don’t know how or what to do.  I end up feeling like I have to show someone flowers I’ve cut from the garden of my life, rather than the actual garden itself.  

And I’ll never be ready for a relationship like that; not after what I had with him. 

With John, I was witnessed.  I was known. And I was loved in light of my past and the wounds I carried into our relationship.  

Now that he’s dead, I see that so many people only know how to love people in spite of those things.  

And, no matter how much time goes by, even if that means there is not another “til death do us part” kind of love in the years I have left, I’ll never be ready to be loved in a way that feels less true or less good than the way he loved me when he was still here.

A Toast to the Ones We Lost

There’s a certain type of person with a certain type of heart who, before setting out to do something they love, will see the inherent danger, corruption, and uncertainty that they will encounter along the way, and still choose to do it anyways.  

This is a toast to them.  

They’re the type of people who aren’t “in it” for the glory because they realize that glory isn’t something that can be found, rather it can only be bestowed.  So they go, not in search of glory, but with an openness to it.   An awareness of it; that it is something that they might glimpse, but never keep.  

They’re the type of people who you fall in love with despite the inherent danger and uncertainty of their way of life because, in a world filled with the atrophied spirits of those who live in search of safety and comfort, they somehow are the only ones who ever seemed fully alive.  

So when they die, whether it be in a training mishap, or in combat, or because of sickness or suicide, there’s a real sense that we have lost something of which there was already too little of: people like them.  

It’s not that ‘only the good die young’ as much as only the good truly seem to be alive in the first place.

That’s why when they die, it is, for a while, impossible to see their death as anything other than a cruelty.  To only be able to speak about them and talk about them seems unjust.  Until one day, you begin to realize there is a hidden glory in the stories we tell about them.

A kind of glory most people don’t understand, but one that you know they will one day.

Until that day comes, with the pictures, and videos, and messages they left behind, with the stories they wrote on our hearts: we recollect them.  And we continue to collect and gather more and more pieces of them which lay hidden in the days, months, and years we have stretching out before us. 

And we show people what we can of them, we give them glimpses and flashes of the light which they once shone on us and we trust that people will know it one day: what made them so different.  What set them apart.  And why they could never be forgotten. 

Until that day, we raise a toast to them.

We will remember them and try, impossible as it may be some days, to live with a faith that only their death could bring out of us:  a faith which “set us free from optimism long ago and taught us hope instead.”1

A toast to the ones we lost yet somehow still keep.

1  Hart, David B. The Doors of the Sea. Eerdmans, 2011.

What I Now Know

I never knew what you saw in me.

When you were alive, there would be moments where I would pull your face close to mine and stare, and you would always laugh it off like it was a joke.  At the time I guess I didn’t understand why I was doing it either, but looking back, I think I was trying to make out my reflection in your eyes, as if maybe, if I looked hard enough, I would be able to see myself through them. 

But I never could see what you saw.  

Others couldn’t either, I don’t think.  

I had a past.  I had issues and shortcomings.  I was unrefined and unfinished.  

I used to think that you just chose not to see those things, or that you idealized me so much that you couldn’t see them.  I used to think that if you’d been given more time, those parts would have outweighed whatever good you saw in me.  

But the longer I’ve had to sit with my grief and the sincere yet imperfected love we had (and still have) the more I can see that you didn’t ignore these things; on the contrary, you saw them all but had the understanding to know that the sum of all of my broken parts added up to a very real and very human person.  

So I know now what you saw: You simply saw me.  

A person who by the grace of God was called “yours” for a little while.   

You saw me as a person weighed down by crosses she couldn’t see herself.  A fellow wayward human struggling to shoulder burdens she couldn’t remember picking up and didn’t know how to put down.  I would always ask you if I was more a “burden” or a “blessing” but I now know that the burdens, and the sharing of them, were the blessings.  

You could see all this, and you helped me carry what you could while you were here because you understood what I didn’t at the time: where I was supposed to be going.  

I never understood why you walked with me during the last two years of your life until I got to where you were leading:  To the foot of the cross of the One who would help me carry what I simply could not anymore.  You were leading me to a place where I would be spoken for throughout eternity.  

But you spoke for me here.  

Of all the voices I’d heard before you and all the voices I will hear after, nothing will ever change the fact that I was lucky enough to be spoken for on this Earth.  By you.

Nothing will ever change the fact that I was lucky to hear my name being called by your voice.  

I know this now.  

And I also know that your name is still being said by the One who called us into existence to begin with, albeit in a tone and pitch which I cannot perceive.  I know it’s still being said though. I know you still exist.

And I know when my time on this Earth is done too, when I, like you, have seen my last birthday, we will once again be a part of the same melody.  

Two notes among many in the same song: a song of gratitude, a song of love, a song that will ripple through eternity itself.  

On Grief and Holy Saturday 

We laid him to rest a few months after he died.  

Military funerals take some time to arrange, so I had hoped against hope that the months would give me time to prepare for the finality of what was coming.  But looking back on it now, the amount of time between his accident and burial felt more like a time to be endured than a time to live in.  The moments blurred and bled into one another making the months feel more akin to one long, drawn out day.  

In short:  Though time moved forward, I did not.  

It was a state of limbo like the dark day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. 

A Holy Saturday of my own: a state of being neither in the life I knew before nor a life that is to come.  And even though I had very little tangible faith back then, I think I largely believed in some sense, that if I lived “nobly” enough or put on a brave face until the funeral, that a God I didn’t really believe in might decide to give him back to me.  

I longed for a resurrection I had no right to believe in.

I think this is the state of mind that Joan Didion referred to as “magical thinking.”  A state where delusion is the only accessible form of comfort within reach as we scramble to make sense of what came to pass without knowing how to leave it in our past.  

The delusions gave way to reality the day of his services, as did any comfort they brought with them.  

Any semblance of denial I had been living in was buried with him, and I remember coming home and feeling as if everything inside me had been carved out and replaced with the ground that now lay on top of him. And I finally had to accept that it was over.  All the promise of a life with him, and the future that called me into each day was finished.  And there would be no more.  

In the shadow of this reality, against all rationale and reason, I found myself kneeling beside my bed and  struggling against words that were clawing their way out of me from the depths of my spirit.  

And I remember pleading:  Please…please come back. 

The futility of saying these words was not lost on me.  I knew the implausibility of the request I was making, and yet I kept speaking these words over and over again… 

Please, come back. 

Simple words that were drawn from the deepest parts of my heart that slowly poured and cascaded into a flowing litany of lament:

Please.  Come back.  

This can’t be happening.

Come back. 

Because this world is mean and I cannot stand to be here.  

Because you were good.  

Come back, please.  

Because you told me the truth.  

Because I could tell you the truth.  

Because you would hear it. 

I’m begging you: Please, come back now.  

Because this hurts.  

Because I’m lost.  And I don’t know what I’m doing.  

Please. 

Please.  Come back.  

Years have gone by since that moment, and in those years I have come to see that those words which rang so empty to me had been ringing in the ears of God since before there was any time for Him to move through.  I’ve come to see that He was waiting for the fullness of time and the cries of the disciples on Holy Saturday before He spoke his word back to humanity once and for all.

There’s a kinship in those words between all who have spoken similar ones and the first followers of Christ.   There’s a comfort in knowing that I was not the first person to pray a prayer against hope, a prayer asking for the impossible: for the one that we love to come back to us.  

I wasn’t the first, and I certainly won’t be the last.   

I have very little doubt that the followers of Christ were also not the first people to make such a request of God.  They were, however, the first to have their Holy Saturday prayers answered, when on Sunday, if we can bring ourselves to believe such a thing could happen… Jesus rose again.  

It is an incredibly difficult thing to believe…that a broken and tortured rabbi was put to death only to rise as a God who is a true light in the darkness. A God who, before the foundations of the Earth were laid, saw that the deepest cries of our heart would pour from the grief and pain of loss and who answered those pleas with his life.  

A God who waits in the hell that is Holy Saturday- between tragedy and the resurrection of new life- and walks with us from one side to the other. 

A God who is good.  

A God who comes back for us. 

Who tells us the Truth because He is it.  

A God who returns because we are lost, and we don’t know what we are doing.  

A God who hears us.  

Who knows this world is mean and how we hurt while in it.  

A God who “put to death the power death held over us.”  

Because He knows the way.  Because He is the Way.

Because He is a God who loves us and who does not leave us -not even for a moment-  to walk alone.

In Grief’s Silence

There’s a phenomenon that occurs anytime someone finds themself in a foreign land where they do not know or speak the language.  Even though it is an uncomfortable stage of acculturation, it’s actually a vital part of becoming a member of a new culture or Way of life. 

It’s called “the silent period.”  

During this time, a person is inundated with so many unrecognizable sounds and experiences from an unrecognizable culture, that they can’t even make an attempt to articulate what they are experiencing, so they walk around mostly silent.  Anytime they do try to speak, they aren’t quite able to convey exactly what they were meaning to, so they retreat back into observing the world around them until the words that they are looking for are within their grasp.    

To the outside world, when someone is in their “silent period,” it often looks like they aren’t finding any meaning in their surroundings, but, ironically, they are actually deeply engaged with all that is going on while their eyes, ears, mouth and brain try to put everything together.   

Oftentimes when people attempt to rush out of this silent period, they will often misuse words and confuse concepts, but even those mistakes are a crucial part of learning a new language.  

People can stay in this silent period for a long time; it is just how humans are.  We are able to take in and understand our experiences long before we are able to speak about them meaningfully.  

Irregardless of how long we are there, it is necessary to go through this silent period so we can arrive at a stage which is simply referred to as “the home stage:” a stage where the person feels completely settled into a new way of life.  

 But when the words finally do come, when we are able to articulate what we were taking in for all those months and years, the words often come pouring out like water from a spring that had been lying in anticipation for someone to dig deep enough to find it.

This is how I would describe my experience of being taken to the foreign lands of grief.  

I entered into a “silent period” of my own… wandering alone in the deserts for years, acutely  aware that things were happening around me, but unable to put them into words.   And though I knew deep down that Someone was leading me through this desert, I did not know who or what was walking with me, step by step, to higher and more solid ground.  

It’s now when I look back that I can see very clearly where I was and Who I was with: I was the prodigal child wrapped in the arms of her loving Father who was whispering to her all the words she needed to hear but, as of yet, could not understand.  I didn’t quite know how to put into words that I was experiencing “being found” because I had never fully been aware that I was ever lost. 

So I stayed in that embrace like a suffering patient being held by a doctor who kept whispering over and over in a language she didn’t understand: “you will be made well again.  I am making you well.”  

The silent stage is different for all people, but we all experience it when we are in a strange and unfamiliar place.  And when it comes to the places grief takes us, where all of the signs are indiscernible, and the roads all seem circular, I can understand why I stayed spiritually mute for years while my Father continued to whisper as I suffered in my silence.  

But then the words started to come.   At first, it was just words and phrases which I would hesitantly and self consciously speak out of my silence…

God.

Is real.  

He is for me.  

I am his.  

The simplest phrases with deep, profound meanings that I could only understand in the silence of my heart.  These words, simple as they may be, were enough to illuminate the place where all my wayward missteps and the agony of grief had gotten me: to the foot of The Cross.  

And it was only when realizing where I was that the words God had been speaking to me while in His embrace were given to me, and I found myself finally being able to say what I could not before: 

That I am the daughter of the Most High King. 

That my Father has put to death all that was meant to torment me.  

And that death itself, and the grief it leaves in its wake, has been crushed under the weight of The Cross on which my God hangs.  

That I will be well. 

That all things shall be well.  

I found myself saying these words, and I still find myself saying these words as I gaze up at The Cross with a full recognition of what those words mean and why it took me so long to be able to say them and how those words cast a light on the shadowlands of grief. 

It took me years of being in my “silent period” to finally get to a place I never knew I was missing but to which I was always being called…

To finally get me home.  

And So I Tell Your Story

When I was eighteen, my aunt gave me a copy of her favorite book: a small parable about the love of flight.  

It was a thin volume that contained a simple yet deep story which had, over the course of her life, become increasingly important to her because the person who had given it to her, my grandfather, had loved it very much.  In fact, he had been the one who passed the book on to her.  

And she, years after he died, shared it with me.  

And when I met you, I couldn’t help but think of how much you reminded me of the central character in that book.  I remember telling you about it during the first few weeks that our own story began to unfold.   

In fact, that book, and the story it contained, was my first gift to you.  And when I handed it to you, I couldn’t help but feel that the love of my grandfather’s original gift was somehow living on. 

That’s what happens when a good story is passed on: it honors and brings to mind the person responsible for originally sharing it.  The story my grandfather left our family decades ago, to this day, remains a gift.  

And in that same way, six years ago, when God started writing the story of you and I, it too became a story worth sharing.

And I do share it.  Constantly.  

That story, our story, I flip and read through it so often in my head, and I speak of it so much, that I sometimes worry that, over the course of time, some of the details will eventually fade away or distort. Or that some of the pages will be loosened from their binding and possibly be lost or lose their meaning.

I worry that our story will become so worn out, that there will be days, weeks, months, and even years where I won’t even think to reach for it, because I’ll begin to believe that a story that was lived so long ago couldn’t possibly have anything new to offer anyone. Even myself.

I worry about these things every time someone asks me how long I plan to let your loss define me.  

And to be honest, I’m not sure how long defining moments in our lives are allowed to keep defining us.  I’m not sure they ever actually stop?  

What I do know though is that lament and the telling of the stories of our dead is in our bones. 

In fact, for thousands of years, in countless civilizations, the stories of the dead so strongly rattled in the bones of those who loved them, that their grief would pour loudly onto city streets. Displays of lament became so disruptive that eventually laws were put into place in an effort to contain them. Grief was viewed as something to be done out loud; a “discourse of pain” between humans in the throes of mourning and the throne room of God. In some places, the real tragedy was a death that was left unnoticed, unmourned, and “unscreamed.”

The stories of our dead were always meant to be told – to be shared – and so I share yours. I share your story with others so others can then share theirs with me: A call and response about people we love. A growing song of lament.

I share your story because, when I do, the One who wrote it knows that His gift was good. 

And you were a good story… a beautiful one. Albeit, one with too few chapters.

And though I would have written your story very differently… And though I sobbed, tore at my skin, and pleaded at God’s feet that you should be granted a longer one: as time has gone on, I am beginning to see that I could not have actually written it any better.

And so I tell it.  As it was and as it is.  

I speak of your story, which like the one I got from my aunt decades ago, was a gift whose importance I could never have conceived of when it was first, from God’s hands, placed into mine.

On Falling Stars

I told you my favorite constellation once.

It was when we first met, and you were telling me about the place you lived and how the skies got so dark over there, that you could see more stars than you had ever seen before in your life.

I remember asking you if you could see Cassiopeia, a constellation of five stars that formed the outline of a queen who was trapped on her throne. I remember telling you that I always found myself looking for her in the skies.   

I’m not sure what it was about that specific arrangement of stars that always spoke to me, but I guess there was something about the image of someone being helplessly spun around as the world turned beneath her that seemed, in a way, relatable.  

The world always appeared to me as it must have to Cassiopeia: swirling and unstable with no fixed horizon in sight.  I guess I saw myself in her…a constellation that could only be made sense of from light years away, here on Earth.  

I imagine that the five stars that make her up have no idea that they are a part of a larger story which can only be seen with the perspective of someone far away and far removed from them.  I doubt the stars understand that each of them play a role in giving the other four stars meaning and purpose.  I doubt they know they are a crucial part of a cosmic pattern that appears random when up close, but from a distance, makes more sense than it has any reason to.   

I imagine each star in Cassiopeia thinks itself to be alone and purposeless with no idea that there are other stars, just like them, depending on their light and existence to make sense of their own. 

And that’s when I think of you, and I wonder if that’s what it was like for you when you died.  I wonder if you were able to see the light and sense you brought to the world and the people who knew you.  

I imagine you, like the stars within a constellation, could not begin to comprehend how many people depended on your life and the light it brought to make sense of their own lives.  How could someone possibly see or perceive the vital role they play in the configuration of other people’s lives while they are living their own?  

I can’t speak for others, but I know for me, when you died, it was as if someone extinguished one of the five stars in Cassiopeia. 

What was once a recognizable and stable pattern was now randomness and chaos.  With you gone, I could no longer make out the form of my own life.  There was no girl.  There was no throne.  And there was no longer an Earth spinning beneath her.  

I can only imagine how many people felt the same way; people who hadn’t spoken to you in years, who had lives that had expanded far beyond the stretch of sky they met you in, were left broken and grasping to reclaim a sense of self that was inexplicably shaken by your death. 

We can’t see it from here.  Our importance.  Our role. I don’t think you could see it when you were alive.

But I have hope that you can see it now.  

I hope that is a part of the joys of Heaven, or wherever you may be: that you can see what we don’t have the perspective or distance to see until we’re gone.  I hope you can see  the lights of the people who loved you being moved into new constellations, new patterns, and new creations that had no reason to exist when you were still here with us.  

I don’t know where you live now, but I hope that if it has dark skies, you will be able to see what none of us down here can.  I don’t know what the skies of Heaven look like, but I hope we are the stars you see.  

And I hope that you can make me out from where you are and that you can see that I’m transfigured into a new constellation; one that you are still a part of somehow.  I hope you can see that I’ve found solid ground to stand on and a fixed horizon to gaze at.    

And I hope you can feel it in your soul, like I can feel it in mine, that you were the falling star that led me straight to it.  

On Dying Wounded

There are cuts and wounds so deep and irregular that doctors, in an effort to close them, have no choice but to extend them outwards.  Ironically, elongating a wound, well past the boundaries of the original trauma, sometimes is the only way to ensure it has a chance to heal properly.  

I found myself thinking about this yesterday. 

I was at work and was letting my mind wander while revisiting the moments that had stitched the day together, and somewhere between one thought ending and another beginning, a memory of you crept in.

And for the first time in months, I felt that familiar tug.  

It wasn’t a feeling of pain… more a feeling of tension. And for a moment, it was as if every memory of you was being pulled taut, almost to the point of breaking.

It was kind of like the sensation of a suture repeatedly being pulled through a numbed laceration.  

And in that moment, I just needed to hear your voice.  Your voice was the only thing I could think of that could slacken what was being pulled tight somewhere inside me.  

I guess that is the very nature of the wounds we leave on others after we die, John.  (That’s the nature of the ones you left behind on me, at least.)   

The gashes grief left in me are deeply irregular; they’re like the wounds surgeons struggle to close. And, even three years later, I can’t seem to find a way to get the lacerated ends to fit back neatly again.  And so they get tugged on and pulled as I attempt to move forward.   

And yesterday I got to thinking that, maybe, this is also why the hand of God, in all Its wisdom, takes the borders of grief and extends them outward.  Just like the doctors that model themselves after Him, He seems to elongate the wounds of grief far past the boundaries of where anyone would believe they should go. And maybe…maybe that’s why grief lasts so long: because the worst injuries, whether they are spiritual or physical, require extension before they can be sutured and healed.  

Maybe what seems to be the cruelest facet of grief, its duration, is actually an act of divine mercy. Maybe the pain we feel long after people die is a necessary elongation so that our wounds may be mended properly.     

I guess that’s why we feel the sting of someone’s death until we die ourselves? 

And maybe the end of life is finally when the broken edges that continued to tug and pull and grow taut will finally be closed over with a final stitch.  

That might be what death is: the final tug as God removes the threads that bound what always hurt, but never healed.

Maybe that’s how it works? I’m not quite sure, honestly.

I guess all I am sure of is that I will die wounded.  All of us will.   

And all I can do is pray that when my eyes close for the last time, that I will find you John.  That I will find you at the end of the wounds you left behind.  

On Finding Love Again

I treated love as a trivial thing before I met you, John.

I always believed people could will themselves into thinking they loved one another. And that loving someone, just like anything subjected to the trials of time, eventually turned into habitual duty. 

Before we met, I had a pattern:

I would spend a few months going out with friends, meeting new people, and eventually, I would find someone I figured I could will myself to love.  After careful assessment of the person and an attempt to weigh the pros and cons of being with them, I would declare to myself that, yes…I can love this person. 

And I’d tell them I loved them. And when they told me they loved me, I’d say it right back to them.

And when we would break up, I would call up a friend and cry into the phone and say, “…but I loved him.” 

And then a few months later, I would start going out with friends, meeting new people…and the cycle would repeat. 

That’s the pattern I lived out for most of my life.

That was love to me for most of my life: a lukewarm melodrama I could manifest after acting out a recycled pattern of choices that seemed to always work. And I never understood how, if this was love, anyone could will themselves into loving someone enough that something like marriage or long term partnership would ever actually work.  

But then, John… I met you.

And for the first time, love wasn’t a decision that I needed to will myself to make. 

Loving you wasn’t a choice…it was more a reality that I was asked to accept. A reality that something outside of myself was urging and willing me towards: I was simply going to love you deeply whether I wanted to or not.

But I wanted to love you. And I did, John. I absolutely loved you.

I loved you so much, in fact, that I was angry that I had ever used the word before with anyone else.  

I could see it for the first time: how the alchemy between two people could have such a charge to it, that an actual lifetime together wasn’t merely an option as much as a foregone conclusion. Something you’d be crazy not to want to try.

For the first time, my fear of the future was muted.

You would always tease me about that fear and the misguided vanity that it flowered from. You always thought it was silly that I feared how time would change the shape of my body, my face, and ultimately, would change the way you saw me.  I was always so scared of that.

And I don’t think I ever told you this when you were alive, but right before you died, I realized that I was wrong.  Not about time changing the way I looked, but about thinking that time could actually change the way you saw me.  

John, I know now, that in your eyes…I was never going to age.   

I loved you. More than my own desire to be happy. 

And something about what you did to my heart, whatever you were able to pour into it, felt like the whispers of something eternal.  

John, after spending so much of my time on this Earth searching for life and clinging to anyone or anything I met along the way that might have an idea where to find it: I met you.  I was willed to do so.

And there was nowhere else to go after that.  So I stayed where I was, and we got two years together.  And then God took you back.   

We got two years, John. 

It’s almost a laughably short amount of time to most people down here on Earth, but I don’t think most people know what two years with you can do to a person’s heart.  

And what did that time do to it? 

Did it break it?  Absolutely. 

Teach it?  Yes. 

But most importantly: That time showed my heart that it was something worth cherishing.  That it was something good. 

And then when you died, I was left with it.  

That heart you’d spent the last years of your life speaking goodness into tried as hard as it could to keep beating.  

And right around that time you’d been dead for two years, I found myself wondering how, on this Earth, I was supposed to give this heart you left me with to anyone else. 

But I tried.  

I tried my old patterns: to will myself into finding someone to love with this heart that you shaped.

I went on dates, John.  I even allowed myself to get swept up in new romances a few times.  And I’d find myself doing the same things I’d done with you, and having inside jokes, and waking up genuinely excited to have someone to talk to.  

But the love inside still had nowhere real to go.  

And I kept thinking to myself, “he would want me to love again…” And people would tell me that in order to honor you, “I should find someone to love again,” until finally it occurred to me that maybe I should just  ask you where you wanted what you left in my heart to go.  

And (through the grace of God) I heard you say: 

Babe, of course I want you to find love again.  

In fact, I want you to find it everywhere.  And in everyone.  (Even in the people you don’t like)   And even more so in the people who have hurt you. And if you find a person or a place where there is very little goodness…pour my goodness there. 

And love? Find it. Find it everywhere that I’m not.

So I’ve been doing that, John.  I’ve been wringing my heart out like a sponge on other people’s hurt, especially hurt I’ve caused.   And in the lives of our friends.  And in the lives of my students.

And, at times, I worry there will be nothing left in it.  

But in those memories I have with you, and in the words you spoke to me, and in the hands of the God you led me to, I find all the places that I can go to fill it back up with what is good.  

And with this heart you left in me, I go out into this world you left me in, and I find love again, and again, and again.  

And I’ll keep doing so.

****

(Until our hearts beat together once more, John, I will keep following that will that got me to you)

A Year in the Life of a Pilot’s Widow

I want to start off by addressing that I don’t really know why I am writing this right now, other than the fact that I have something to say to anyone who has or will ever mourn a pilot. I’m going to keep this short, and I’m going to keep it concise…

Before I get into that, I want to talk about what it means to love a pilot. Not a person who flies. But a pilot. Someone who was born to take to the skies.

I have heard so many military spouses talk about how they simply pretend the jobs our husbands and boyfriends have are “normal.” They pretend that they are bankers or lawyers. I get that this is done to protect themselves, but ultimately, they aren’t bankers. They are pilots.

Their jobs are epic. They have legendary stories to tell.

If you love a pilot, you love someone who pretty much tames and rides dragons all day. And then comes home and does laundry. And eats dinner with you. And asks about your day.

If you love a pilot this means weekly if not daily conversations about the dangers of the job. The dangers of ejection. The possibility of severed limbs. Third degree burns. Broken backs. And death.

Not just one conversation, but many conversations.

If you love a pilot, you love someone who spends their whole life fighting gravity, and bending it. And to love a pilot means that one day, you very realistically may have to mourn that pilot, because even the greatest pilots can die doing what they love.

It’s the gig. To truly love a pilot is to be ready and willing and able to try your best to survive their death.

And when and if, one day, your pilot falls from the sky, we, their widows, are left to mourn heroes.

We are also left with a community who says they want to support your grief but also really hopes you stay quiet about it.

When you mourn a pilot, everyone mourns with you for a while. You get a lot of calls from people who didn’t know your pilot but want to express their condolences.

You also get messages from pilots you don’t know. Their wives in the next room. These pilots are panicked, they have so much fear of death, but their wife simply can’t understand and so they can’t talk to her. (Maybe because she is trying to convince herself that he has a normal job and he doesn’t want to upset her).

So these pilots talk to you. Because you’re already destroyed.

And though you are broken and grieving, these are your person’s brothers, so you stay up til all hours of the night trying to console broken men while you yourself are broken.

When you mourn a pilot, you know conversations are going on about you in the spouse groups. Are you still a spouse? Most think yes. But there’s always one or two who consider you less of a spouse, and after a few months of trying to figure out how to deal with their passive aggressive dismissals of your suggestions, you decide that maybe, ultimately, you may need to leave that group completely. And leave those friendships.

A lot of people tell you that they’re going to do really amazing things to honor your dead pilot. Getting necklaces made. Bracelets. They’re going to send them to you when the designs are finished…but the designs never get finished, and ultimately you just forget about it.

When you mourn a pilot, you listen to other spouses with living husbands complain about the amount of time their guy is flying. They don’t complain in group chats…they, for some reason, complain to you.

You get called by investigators over and over and over again. Every time, they need a little more information. A few more details for the report. And then the report of the accident comes out, and you read “pilot error,” listed across the top. And your soul screams. And you feel like your guy has died twice.

And on top of that, people keep saying over and over and over again, “I’m sure his last thoughts were of you,” and you want to scream at them, “do you even get it? Do you even understand what they do up there? He better not have been thinking of me, he better have been trying to get out of the god damn airplane so he could get back to me.”

When you mourn a pilot, you show up to their final funeral service, and you see people with their cell phones out.

You collapse by their coffin afterwards when everyone is trickling away and you sob. And you clutch the name tag hanging from the handle of the casket and you look at your dead pilot’s name. And you feel your heart shatter again.

And while that’s happening, someone walks up behind you and taps you on the shoulder and asks if you can move for a second…because they want a picture of the casket (it’s their first time at Arlington Cemetery after all, and they don’t know if they’ll ever be back).

So you move. And they get their picture.

And at the services, you run into one of the pilots who called you months earlier. And later on after the funeral, he calls you again when it is a little too late. He’s alone in his hotel room. He asks if you want to meet up. And you hang up the phone and delete his number. And you mourn your dead pilot even more because he was truly a good person. And you feel like you’ve been left to the wolves.

When you mourn a pilot you consider the idea that maybe you don’t want to live anymore. You make the mistake of telling one of the wives. And she takes the screenshots of those messages and shows them to other wives. And ultimately one of them finally calls you and goes, “I just think you should know she is saying these things about you,” and you stare blankly off into space and ask her, “did you stand up for me?” To which she responds, “well, it’s not really my place to do so, but I thought you should know.”

And so you think about it.

And you make a list of every single person from your pilot’s squadron, and you delete them from social media. And you write really angry posts about things they never let you say. And you’re talking for the first time, honestly, about how you feel. And you let it all out. You use your anger to scorch the Earth around you. And it feels good.

People start calling you and telling you you’re causing too much pain to others. And you laugh to yourself that anyone is trying to talk to you about what “too much pain,” is. And it feels good.

The fact that people can see, for the first time, how little they mean to you in the face of what you lost, feels good. It feels so good, because you finally, after almost a year, feel like people hear you.

And the first year ends. And you’re finally breathing again after spending so much time suffering a death by a thousand cuts.

And you take your first few steps into the second year of being a dead pilot’s widow.

And then another pilot dies. And you see his widow in the news articles and you hear the talks and lofty speeches about how the community is going to pull together to support her.

And you just hope it goes differently this time.

****

There are truly so many great and supportive people within the military communities, please know I acknowledge that.

This post is a culmination of things that happened to me and other widows after their losses. So obviously…there is some room for improvement.

Towers of Grief

In the last few weeks, people all over the world have watched as the life they once knew, piece by piece, was stripped away from them.

People have woken up every day to a world filled more and more with shadows.  People have woken up to see the ever expansive landscape of their life become limited.  They’ve bit by bit had to let go of things that are outside of their control and retreat further and further inward.

Gone are the distractions.  Gone are the loud parties.  Gone are the empty moments that they tried to fill with empty people.

And many people have slowly come to realize that pretty soon, they were going to have nowhere else to go but the four walls of their homes, where ultimately, they would have to deal with that place not many of them ever cared to venture: the inner world of their own minds.

The inner caverns of our minds are where we find anxiety lurking and fears creeping up behind us.  Many of our inner worlds hold skeletons shattered by the hatchets we refused to bury.  Many of our inner worlds are ruled only by shrieking chaos.

My inner world used to terrify me.  So I kept it locked up and used every excuse I had not to venture within arms length of its door.

But after John died, that door was blown wide open.

And from it, the wreckage of every experience I’d ever had and every emotion I’d never dealt with came spewing out, and I had no choice but to look at the chaos around me and try to start fitting some pieces back together without knowing how any of it was supposed to look.

I spent the better part of the last year rebuilding my inner world.

Pulling splinters from bleeding hands and walking away in frustration more times than I can remember.  But continuing to build, and mold, and shape.

And it’s only in the last few weeks that I have been able to see what I’ve been building in the last year. It’s only recently that I can see that I was building a tower.

A majestic one.

One that sits high above the clouds like a castle from a fairy tale.  Somehow I seem to have built a tower out of mangled and charred debris.

It’s almost as if this inner world was crafted by the hands of someone who loved me.  Deeply.  Someone who couldn’t help with the wreckage of my outer world, so did what he could with the wreckage of my own mind.

It’s almost as if I sit in a house built by the kind of love that only grief could unleash.

There are no shadows here.  There are no unlit corners.  There are no skeletons. Or daggers.  Or ghosts.

There is candlelight. There is magic and wonder and fairy houses. There are subtle hints of blue.  There are books.  And words. And there is love.

There is so much beauty in the ivory tower that John built for me out of the wreckage of my grief.  There is a place for me to sit high above the chaos of the world and just peer off into the clouds.

I’m reminded here that the wind can only carry the echoes of cries so far up.  I could ignore the world’s pain from here.  Easily.

But I won’t.

It’s from this ivory tower that I am able to take deep breaths of clean air.  And kiss the whispers of my loved ones every morning before wandering down to the ground and, placing my ear against the door for a second, begin to venture out to do what I know must be done… to minister to the pain of others.

The ivory tower that was built from my grief is only for rest.  And perspective.

It is for a bird’s eye view so I can find people who need me and walk to them. So that I can find people that desperately need magic.  And words.  And wonder.  And love.

This ivory tower was built for me so that I can find people in pain, kneel beside them, and whisper:  I know your world is burning. Mine was too.  

But look…look at that castle in the sky.  Look at what can be built from the ashes of a wrecked life.  

 

 

On God, Blind Faith, and Narrow Paths

It’s been no secret that, in the year since losing John, I’ve been going through somewhat of a profound spiritual experience.

Some people call it an “awakening,” but to me that term suggests that I’m “awake” while others are “asleep.”  And I think that comes across as pretty arrogant. So, for that reason, I prefer to say that I’m experiencing a “spiritual re-alignment.”

I do not think I was “asleep” in any sense of the word before John’s accident.  I think I was like many people who consider themselves atheist or agnostic.  I was fully invested in and engaged in my life.  And I was open to finding and experiencing what people referred to as “faith.”  I just never did.

Growing up, I had sat through sermons in church pews, temples, and gurudwaras waiting for some feeling or inclination that there was more to life than just what we saw around us.  It didn’t matter if I went to a youth group or yoga class, people sitting around and talking about God and universal connection sounded exactly like people just sitting around talking.  It was uninspiring at best.

Nothing ever moved me.  Nothing ever stuck.

So I relegated faith and belief to the same category as I did fairy tales: I felt that they were stories people told themselves to make the world less scary and lonely.

I eventually turned to a much more rational approach to the world…I turned to therapy and, eventually, to travel and this worked well for me.

I did really well in therapy because once I was presented with information that contradicted an existing belief or paradigm, I was open to adapting and changing the way I thought.  My therapists (and John) loved this about me, and through therapy, I honed my ability to experience, process, and adapt to new information.

Though I had therapy to help me process my experiences, I did not abandon religious or spiritual ideas all together.  But I also did not have a meaningful way to incorporate them into a life that already made sense on its own, so I used religion and spirituality in the same way we use filters on photos: as a way to artificially brighten or dim very real experiences.

That was the nature of my faith.

I’d had plenty of dark times in my life before, and “faith” never did anything for me.  It wasn’t like a flashlight that would turn on when times got dark, it was more a kaleidoscope.  A lens I could pick up and hold to my eye anytime I wanted to see the unreal and the abstract projected onto the real world.

And then I met John and found all the faith I ever needed in the form of another person, and I remember feeling blessed.  And I remember feeling happy.  I remember feeling good.

But then he died.

And everything started going dark.

And faith, the children’s toy that it had always been to me, I didn’t even bother reaching for it.  It was useless, and I knew it.

And the day John died I also knew something else…that if there was a God, he must have been silent my entire life for one reason:  because he does not waste his time on the wretched.  I knew that God must only speak to “the good.” People like John who had been lucky enough to be given real faith.

I knew that God must have thought it better for John to be dead than to be loving  someone like me. I knew that God must have killed John in order to “save” him.

If there was a God,  I didn’t hate him, but I knew he must have hated me.

And so I sat in the darkness of my life accepting that I was either truly alone, or detested by a God I didn’t know how to believe in.

And I imagine that’s when God, horrified by the highly dramatic conclusions I was coming to, decided to do what he does best…he decided to turn on a light.

And in the darkness I was in, it was all I saw.

It was a subtle light, like the flashing of an incoming call on a cellphone screen, but it was the only light I could see.  So I walked towards it and stumbled through what I now know were my first steps of blind faith.

I took the first steps of faith, not knowing where I was going or what I was doing. But every time I got to a light I could see that another one stretched out in front of me.  Some were as faint as an engine light on a car dashboard.  Others were haunting, like a T.V. that keeps turning itself on in a dark room.

The lights didn’t make sense.  They weren’t in a straight line, but…they were lights in the darkness, so I kept walking to them.

I was certain that every light I got to would be the last one I would see, but there was always another one.  And I had no idea who or what was turning them on.

Each step was a stumble through the darkness on a path that no one else but me could sense. And that was confusing, and terrifying, and so many times I was worried I’d succumbed to delusion because there was no way any of this could be real.

I struggled to come to terms with what was happening.

And as I struggled through the darkness, I struggled to understand how to even put into words what I was experiencing, so I decided to just use one word: God.  God apparently was happening to me.

Only my experience was so different when compared to anything I had ever associated with God before.

It was almost as if John’s death had broken me in such a way that, like a bent antenna, I could now pick up on a new frequency.  Some sort of “God Frequency.”

And in that darkness I found a new sense of sight, where I could sense order in events where I had only ever sensed chaos and disorder.  I could hear and sense so much more than I ever could before.  But in the darkness, I  still struggled to understand why I was being helped.  If God is real, why had he stayed so silent in my life? Why was he so silent in so many people’s lives? Why did he allow us to suffer?  Why?

I started to ask.  And I started to seek.  And I started to question.   And that’s when God asked me if I was ready for him to turn on more of the lights.

And I said, “yes.”

And so he did.

But these lights didn’t light up only the way forward, they illuminated the path behind me, so I looked.  I could see my past, and in it, I could see all the different times God had turned on a light that I simply couldn’t see because there were already so many other lights on.

I saw the highs of my life, and there was God, laughing with me.  I saw the mundane parts of my life, and there was God, gazing mindlessly off into space with me.  And I saw my lowest moments.  I saw the morning I found out that John was dead.  I saw myself in agony.  I saw myself clawing at my own skin.  And I saw God suffering with me.

In this new light, I saw God laughing, living, and suffering through me.

In this light I could see, stretching in front of me, a narrow path with a small gate…leading somewhere, and I understood for the first time why the path to God feels this isolating…it’s because my path is only for me.  No one else.

No one else will ever or has ever walked this exact path before, and no one else can walk it for me.   And it’s terrifying when you know walking the narrow path of your own faith makes you a lunatic to some and a heretic to others.

I guess this is why, “few are those who find it.”

But I’ve been walking it.  And I’ve been talking about it and trying to put this walk into words.  Telling people about the scenery I’ve encountered along the way.

And when this walk is too much, and I can’t get a feel for the next step, I stop.

And I turn my gaze upwards towards the skies John flew in, and I let myself feel lost and alone.  And I let myself cry because I want to be walking this path while holding his hand.

But then I keep walking down my narrow path. Some days I skip down it.  Some days I curse it.  But most days, I simply walk it led by faith and the knowing that love put me on it.

On this path, I have met the fearful.  Those who urge me to get on their path and abandon mine.  Those who use my experiences to validate their belief in a Heaven that will not have me and a Hell that will.   I have met people who, understandably, don’t believe I’m on a path because they don’t trust roads that don’t show up on a GPS.  And I have met people who, because of the heaviness of their own grief, have stopped walking altogether.

I have also met the faithful (of so many faiths), walking their own narrow paths.  Those who stop to minister to the pain of others by offering to be what John was to me: faith in human form.

I see everyone on their own different narrow path…and I also see God with all of them whether they see him there or not.  And he is turning on lights.  Hoping that our lives never get so dark that we are able to see them.

“Do not be dismayed, for your God is with you wherever you go.”

Joshua 1:9

 

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I Didn’t Want a Life That Would Make, “A Great Book”

I cannot stress enough how much writing has served me in the months since John died.  Writing has allowed me to illuminate the saturated murkiness of deep grief in a way that continues to surprise, and at times, exhaust me.

Even though the aftermath of loss is where people typically find themselves with, “no words,”  I, for some reason, have been able to find many.

And so I’ve written them.

I’ve written about the love me and John had and continue to have.  I’ve written about what it felt like to have met him and why it mattered so much. I’ve transcribed the events that led up to the night he died trying to get out of his plane during a routine landing.  And I’ve written at length about how my life has unfolded since.

Writing has served to cauterize the deepest and most gruesome parts of this experience, as well as to illuminate the  incomprehensible moments of re-connection that I’ve been blessed with since the accident.  My writing has connected me to so many others whose journeys run parallel to mine, and I believe it will find its way to people who need it down the line.

My writing has helped me, and so I’ve continued to write.

My writing has also led to many of my closest friends and family earnestly telling me the one thing that almost everyone who faces a tragedy hears at some point:  That one day, I should write a book about all this.

(Believe me when I say that I take this as a compliment).

People have urged me to write a book about the life I had before John.  My relationship with him.  And the healing I’ve undergone since his death.  Almost every widow I know has been urged to do this.

Some do.  Some don’t.  But all our stories, untold or not, really would make for great reading.

I, speaking for myself, find the task deliriously daunting.

Maybe at some point in my life, I will be able to pluck out a single thread in this Gordian Knot of an experience, but until then I think what I want to say most is this:  that my life… this life that would make a great book…I truly wish I did not have it.

I wish it so very much.

I wish my relationship with John didn’t have to be described as “epic.”

I wish I didn’t learn first hand how death can open people’s hearts, only for them to realize that it’s too late for it to do anyone much good.

I didn’t want a life where I watched one of the kindest humans anyone has ever known die.  And I didn’t want a life where I learned that I could survive that kind of pain.

I most definitely did not want a life where some people think I’ve lost my mind because I can see John’s love manifested in dreams and cell phone glitches and balloons.

I did not want to be a seeker. I did not want  wisdom.  I did not want to be an example of strength.  I did not want any part of this life. 

No one would.

I wanted what almost everyone else I know wants…the norm.  I wanted a benign life, yet I was given this one.  And I know people want to read about it because I probably would too.

I suppose the easiest thing to read about are the difficult lives people lead.

But I don’t want a book about me and John because between the romance, obstacles, tragedy (and eventual magic) that our relationship carried with it, I feel we were really more the “fairy tale” type.  I don’t think many people could disagree.

I want our stories to be told in times where immediate comfort is needed, even if that means our names will eventually get lost to time.

I want people to hear about us so they fight for and forgive those they are lucky enough to love in this life.

And I hope, at some point, the story of the time John sent me quarters makes its way to a grieving person who needs to hear it.  I want people to hear about “some pilot” who shows up in kids dreams because he really wants to talk about planes.  I want people to look at red balloons and think, for just a second, that maybe there is more to this life than what meets the eye.

I want nothing more than for these stories to be shared and told…so I will keep writing.  I want nothing more than for people to find hope and re-connection after they lose someone, so I will keep writing.  I feel like it is what I was meant to do, so I will just keep writing.

But I also wish with all my heart that I was the one hearing and reading these stories, not the one writing them.

I don’t want to be living through the difficulties that make for easy reading, no matter how great the book would be.

You wouldn’t either.