EASY CHAIR

Tomorrow is one of those anniversaries we who grieve gather like charms on a bracelet.  It will be four months since Gwen died.  In recognition of that,  I will gear back my posts to this blog site.  It would be too simple to say it's time to move on.  One simply doesn't advance in that sense.  Yesterday I heard  someone say that the event of death is very different from the permanence of death.  That is so true.  It's one thing to abstractly say that my wife died four months ago, it's quite another to get up each morning and realize all over again that she's no longer on the face of the earth.  Similarly, it's one thing to say that Gwen and I loved each other; it's quite another to have the time now to reflect on that love in all the ways it showed itself to be true.  In one of the groups I participate in I recently reminisced about how over the past five years I was so busy caring for the love of my life that I didn't have time to care about her.  I hastily corrected my thinking by remembering that, especially during her illness, I never missed a chance to say "I love you."  Isn't that the ultimate in caring about someone?  It was for us.  It was easy:

EASY CHAIR

Sitting in my easy chair,

staring

out the window,

isn’t easy anymore.

Your empty chair

is all I see.

John A. Bayerl, March 11, 2011 

Every morning you are missing.  Every night you are missed.  The love I discover each day goes on forever, just like you said it would.