BRAVELY BEAUTIFUL

BRAVELY BEAUTIFUL

Her last birthday

with us

we went to a movie,

Secretariat, she loved horses.

Sitting next to her,

there in the theater

seeing her in real life

she looked so shrunken

too small for the seat.

How could she ever have

ridden a horse?

I saw brave and beautiful.

Wanted so much

to protect her

from what lay ahead.

I could not, of course.

Like all who shared her love,
all I could do is watch
as she showed  how to do it all—

bravely and beautifully.

John A. Bayerl, February 15, 2011

 This afternoon my daughter, Anne, and I attended the movie The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo.  Anne will return home to Dallas tomorrow, and I appreciated the chance to do one more family thing with her.  I've been blessed at having been surrounded by the love of our children and grandchildren, relatives, and friends, especially during the past week.  Seeing the movie today was good, it's better to stay busy.  Yet, even at the theater there are the reminders of the seats where we sat, the corner in the wall where I would stash away her folded up wheelchair.  And, it brought back sweet memories of when I read the book on which the movie is based to Gwen each night at bedtime.  It seems fitting to repost a poem that I wrote back in February.

Today, the day after Christmas, I am feeling more blue than usual.  Why should that be, I wonder?  Some of it is the letdown we all experience after the rush of the holidays has subsided.  But, beyond that, I have this feeling of being bereft, deserted by the one who meant everything in the world to me.  As I write this I am aware of how hard and selfish these feelings are; and in some way I don't fully understand it is important for me to write about them.  In my heart and soul I know that Gwen and I loved each other to the end; she fought with everything she had to be with me for as long as she could.  It comes back to what I've written about and felt before; those words "until death do us part" that we repeated in our wedding vows now mean just what they say.  


If at times I do feel deserted by you, Dear; it's because there were so many more things we would have enjoyed doing together, and I still have all this love for you in my heart.  I'm working on  a poem about the week we spent in St. Kitts; one of the things we did get to do.