Pictures and Memories

My Dearest Love,

Today I went for a walk in the woods with the dog. It is beautiful here right now. A clear, fall day with leaves raining down to carpet the woodland paths. Warm too, for the end of September. Your birthday is coming up and what am I going to be able to get you this year? You are beyond my forgetful ways.

Did you hear? Your boy has a girlfriend, for real. She is a cutie and someone you know from the old days, the old neighborhood. Remember the family that moved into the yellow house behind us? They played as kids, went to school together. Now they lie on the couch like two peas in a pod watching movies, and make cookies in the kitchen at night while I hide in our bedroom like a spy.

He is very cute in all of this. He blushes when I mention it (which I try not to do too much). He is growing too. Every day, he seems to stretch a millimeter or two. He is not the little boy of my memory any longer. So bittersweet this is. I miss you.

Today, I added the pictures I took while walking the dog, to a collection of photos I am building on line. While doing so, I came across the folder of pictures we compiled for your memorial. I ran through them all, all three hundred some. Seeing you again was wonderful, and sad, and torturous all at the same time. Whenever I see pictures of you, I am carried back to those times (at least for the ones that belong to "our" era) and I think of what we did, and said, and cried over, and fought about, and loved each other for, and how you helped me to define myself. It is so hard to see the effects the disease and the treatments had on you. But through it all, you kept your smile, and your love, and your spirit. I remember the night you finally left that tortured shell of a body - you spirit moving out until there was only the slimest of ties between your true self and the failing body next to me - then, with a sigh, you were gone.

You know that I have to move on, and I have to learn how to live without you, but still, you were such a part of my life, that it is difficult to completely let go of you. Yet, that is what I must do. I don't mean "forget" you, but "let go." I must let go for both you, and me. You need to be free of the tethers that hold you to this plane and I need to be free to live my life, as much of it as is left to me.

I don't know that others understand this part very well. Perhaps they do and it is I who is carrying the burden of the past. I don't know.

There is someone new in my life. She is a voice on the other end of a phone connection, or the writer of an email, or the author of a blog. I have not met her in person, yet. Soon. And, I have to tell you, I am so glad that she is there (wherever "that" is). The period of time right after your death was pretty bad. Very bleak. After a period of time where it was I who felt dead, I was touched by something that was very much alive. This touch lifted me up from that dark place. It is a beginning of something, but I don't yet know what.

I will let you know.

D.