Hummingbirds.

On Wednesday of this week it will two months since my wife, Gwen, lost her almost five year battle with cancer. More precisely, today is the 59th day I have gotten up to the realization that the one person who was my friend, my lover and my most honest critic is no longer with me. I recently found two packages of letters we had written to each other during the year before we were married and were living 100 miles apart. In my last letter to her, the week before we were married, my final sentence was: "God could not have created a more perrfect mate for me." Her final words in her last letter were: "I love you more." And so it went for 47 years, five month and 12 days. She was my perfect mate, and not a day went by that she didn't try to prove that she loved me more. She kept things that meant a lot to her. A poem she saved began with these lines:

I love you

not only for what you are

but for what I am

when I am with you.

Now, with her gone, I would amend those lines:

I still love you

not only for what you were

but for what I was

when you were with me.

In some ways, our life together was an adventure. No matter what hare-brained scheme I came up with, she was with me all the way. Urging me on, never complaining, always anxious to see what was around the next corner. When we were first married, we postponed our honeymoon so that we could live in Marquette where I took a class in summer school. We never did remember or find time to have a honeymoon. Yet, in a larger sense, our life together was a complete honeymoon. Right up to the end, where it was just the two of us together as she took her last breath. She now knows what lies around the next corner, and I am so sad that she's not here to tell me about it, but also happy that we were given time to, together, prepare for her next adventure.

Gwen loved hummingbirds, some of my best memories of our time together are when we owned our cottage on St. Joseph Island in Canada and would sit on our deck and watch them flit around the hollyhocks and other flowers she had planted. A few years ago we took a cruise, and won a print of any of the pictures that were on display. She picked one of a hummingbird; it hangs in our family room downstairs. I tried all last summer to attract hummingbirds to our back yard, to no avail. I'll try again this year when my family and I establish a "Gwen Garden" in the backyard. I have a hunch the hummingbirds will be there this year. Yesterday morning, just before I awoke, I had a dream where Gwen and I were watching hummingbirds flit about our yard. I had been waiting for a message from her, and I believe that was it.