Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

A year ago today, my sweetheart A died.  It would be two days before I knew this, before anyone who loved him knew this.  As I write this, it is Saturday night, and that Saturday night a year ago, I thought he’d just fallen asleep before our chat, as he did from time to time.  I was a little worried, but nothing like I was on Sunday.  Sunday was a day of barely contained panic, and fear, and worried phone calls.  Monday morning I would learn the worst.   

I have a lot going on emotionally right now, for obvious reasons, and I suppose I have something to say about where the last year has brought me, what I’ve learned, and what my status is after a year of healing.  But that is for another post.  This post is about sharing a tribute to a man I loved, and love, deeply, and by whom I was very, very fortunate to be loved in return.  

I knew when A died that eventually I would write a song, or songs about it, but for the longest time, I didn’t know how, or when.  Immediately after he died, I wasn’t sure I could ever pick up a guitar again.  There has never been a time, before or after he passed, that I played guitar and did not think of him; he is the only reason I am able to play at all.  He’d dispute that, and did, telling me that he merely nudged, but I know the truth.  Any lack of skill on the guitar is my own fault, and my beloved guitar guru bears no responsibility for my thick and uncooperative fingers.  He tried.

The flood and fury of emotions I felt right after he passed were best documented in private journals and this blog, page after page after page.  You cannot contain a flood of emotion in a thimble of a song, limited as it is in size and space.  Perhaps if I were a composer of symphonies, I could get it all in, but there would be no words.  I compose in words, fully cognizant of their inadequacy in naming and describing what cannot be, not really.

I truly didn’t know where to start, and for a long time, I didn’t.  I jotted down lines here and there for months, momentary inspirations and thoughts about him.  But the stakes were high.  I wanted to write a song that would honor him, and do it properly, but how do you do justice to the wonderfulness of the man he was in under 5 minutes?  If I spent the rest of my life writing songs, I could never cover all the reasons I loved him, from his thinking face, to the fact that he wore his watch with the face on the inside of his wrist, just like his dad, to the way he loved his family and friends, and me.  It was too big to contemplate, the loss too painful, and, honestly, I was in no shape to do it.  That struggle is touched on in the second verse.  But it was always in the back of my mind, as he was, and is, at the forefront.

I happened upon a door into starting this song in the closing words of a chapter in a grief book, one of many I’ve read, by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler, that said, simply but sympathetically, “How can we understand when green leaves fall?”  It rocked me, the implied answer being, “Well, of course we can’t.”  We weren’t even close to done loving and living with A yet, and it is incomprehensible. I expect it’ll remain so until the day he and I meet again.  I’ve put him on notice that he has some ‘splainin’ to do.

In the last year, I’ve done a lot of healing, enough to know I have plenty left to do.  This is a long road, and his influence on my life, while he was here and now that he’s gone, cannot be underestimated.  It can’t even be quantified yet, as I discover daily some new part of my life, my heart, my thinking that he touched.  And I know I was blessed; but I miss that touch more than I can say.

Miraculously, it is A himself who has provided me with much of the healing and support that have gotten me this far.  His words that seemed interesting and wise when he said them have come back to me with entirely new perspective when I’ve been low, and given me the strength to keep putting one foot in front of another.  He was always wise.   But when I’d tell him that, he’s say he was just old.  Not old enough, in my opinion.  Not nearly old enough.  We had a date for me to push him down the zig-zags of Lombard Street in his wheelchair in some future we both imagined together.

Anyway, I wanted to write a song that respected both my loss and my love, no easy feat when the loss was shouting over love’s whisper.  I needed to write a song that I could sing without falling apart, though I will admit, my voice has cracked and the world has blurred more than a few times as I practiced it.  The end of the song came as a surprise to me, even though I’m the one who wrote it.  But I think he’d appreciate the hopeful, or at least aspirational, note it ends on.  I think I owe that to him.

There is a distance to this post, as I write about him.  I can feel it.  But so it must be, because there is too much.  The fact of the matter is that I am not really this calm and rational about it, about him, about his death and my grief.  One part of me is.  The rest of me has no words for all of this; there is only feeling, conflicting, competing, and lots of it.  He changed my life when he came into it; he changed it again when he left.  I will spend the rest of my life understanding what that means for me.  But what is unquestionable is that I love him, and I miss him more than I can say.

When I taught at the Episcopal school, our middle school English teacher/church organist was fond of saying “He who sings prays twice.”  It has stuck with me, and I believe it’s true.  I have sung this song so many times, and will sing it many more, each and every time it is a prayer for, and to, my Sweetheart.  This is dedicated to the one I love.

If you click on the title, you can download the song to listen to it.
 

When Green Leaves Fall (Link is fixed as of Monday night, 9:34 MST)

I’ll try to live by
The wise words you spoke
And try to remember the heart that loved me
Instead of the heart that broke.