The Holy Ordinary

This morning, as I reached in the cabinet to get a cup for my coffee, I realized that it was time to run the dishwasher.  There was a cup left, but I couldn't use it--it was Gwen's favorite cup.  I chide myself about this; after all, I use "her" bowls for cereal that I eat with a spoon that she used.  For goodness sake, most of the air you breathe is air she breathed.  The coffee cup has joined what I have come to call the holy ordinary, list; those ordinary items in my life that are in some way made holy through their association with that which makes all things holy--love. That cup reminds me of so many late afternoons spent enjoying a cup of tea with Gwen, something we both loved doing.  Later this morning, as I pedaled the Nu-Step at the gym, the song Red Red Wine played on my i-Pod.  Let the tears begin.  The song instantly took me back twenty some years to a week vacation at a resort on St. Kitts.  One day we took a ride on a catamaran to St. Nevis, and that song was played incessantly. I clearly recall Gwen's delight at the amazing life we discovered beneath us as we snorkeled for the first time.  The conch shell on display in one of our bathrooms I found on a beach there.  It will be looked at with much more reverence today. I'm sure any of those who might read this will be generating their own holy ordinary  lists as they read. We who love find holiness in those we love and all things close to them.

In addition to coffee cups, songs and other artifacts that Gwen and I shared, during the years she was ill we shared a bedroom in a lower level of our home.  Most of that time we shared a big old queen-sized bed, but, as her disease progressed, she slept in a hospital bed on loan from the hospice, and I slept near her in a twin bed.  Immediately after her death my children wisely moved me to the bedroom Gwen and I had used prior to her illness.  The hospital bed was returned to the hospice, and another bed replaced my twin bed in the room where she died. This is another instance where to talk about it too much will profane it, so I offer this poem about the room where I often spend time and can feel Gwen's presence:

THE ROOM MADE HOLY

The room in our house

where she took her last breath

is my hallowed place.

I meet her there often.

You really did it this time!

I say to her.

It’s Christmas, the kids will be home.

How could you?

I lie there, in that room

where we shared it all,

and I ask her to be with me.

I learn the truth

about the price of great love;

grief of equal proportion.

I discover that I love her

in ways I never knew I did,

or could.

John A. Bayerl 

December 9, 2010

This poem  was written about a month after Gwen died.  As I read it now I find that the anger I had then has somewhat dissipated.  The waves of grief, tomorrow's topic, are not as frequent, and I get an occasional glimpse of what life without Gwen at my side is going to look like.  It's not going to get better; just different.  As for the new normal, who want to be normal anyway?