A Year Since You Passed

Jennifer Engel
January 26th, 1973 - January 18th, 2013

I miss you Jen.

One year ago, I held you through that last night, until I could tell that you weren’t with me anymore. 

I wish I could hold you again, just for a moment.  Just a single moment. I’d give everything just for a single moment.

But a year later I've learned you’re still here, somehow.  There have been too many coincidences, too many chance happenings to explain any other way.  Two years ago I would have laughed at someone making that statement. But now, I know.  I know with certainty, you are still here. 

I hope you’re proud of your girls: how Sydney is growing into a young lady; how Kristin is still the kindest, sweetest heart; how Natalie is blossoming academically; and how we’ve gotten stronger through the adversity.  I hope you see I’m doing the best I can bringing them up the way we would have together.

They’re so much like you.  I can see you in their eyes, their smile, or something they do every day.  And it breaks my heart, because I know where it came from.

They miss their Mom. I miss my Wife.  

12 months
or 365 days 
or 8,760 hours
or 525,600 minutes
or 31,536,000 seconds
or too many moments to count

I've counted the passage of time by each of these at some point in the last 12 months.  Sometimes I told myself I just needed to make it through the day.  Other times I simply tried to make it to the next moment without breaking down.  I’ve managed to make it through them one by one to get here, even if a great many of those moments have been in tears.

One of the things I used to say to myself in those horrible first few weeks after you passed was, "In a year, you'll be fine.  You'll have adapted and healed gotten to a point where you aren't such an emotional and mental wreck."  Well, to a certain extent that's true.  But I had no idea the route back to happiness and "normalcy" would be this long.  In a year, I've healed but there is so much more left to go.  I’m still an emotional wreck and have to hide every now and then, lest people see how raw things still are.  Because, even a year later, there are times when the sorrow just takes over.

The say you never really get over the loss of your spouse, you just learn to navigate around it.

The sorrow is still a fixture in my waking hours. It's always there, it's a tangible presence that I can feel. I can step into it anytime I want to. And I do step into it, on purpose, on occasion. I do it because on a certain level I feel I have to. That by doing so I somehow validate the love that you and I had for each other. If I don't then it almost feels like I'm discounting you and our relationship. 
  
In those last days I was struggling to find the courage to face, at least what I believed, to be inevitable.  There were no more options left, and it was time to stop running.  In a quiet moment with no one else in the room You turned to me, and with all your effort just to speak said,  "I can't do this anymore." It was the saddest moment of my life.  We didn't know it, but we only had 14 hours left at that point.  Even now, 12 months later, remembering that moment brings me to my knees. 

I still feel guilty sometimes about agreeing with you so quickly. That maybe if I protested or showed more strength then you would have changed your mind.  But I've come to realize that thought is selfish. You clearly were at the end of your endurance and it was your courage that allowed you to say it was time.  Any more time that you struggled and endured would have been purely for the Girls and I.  No, it was time.  And you called it.  I can only hope that when my time comes I can face it with half the courage and strength you did.

In the bottom of an old pond lived some grubs who could not understand why none of their group ever came back after crawling up the stems of the lilies to the top of the water.  They promised each other that the next one who was called to make the upward climb would return and tell what happened to him.  Soon, one of them felt an urgent impulse to seek the surface; he rested himself on top of the lily pad and went through a glorious transformation which made him a dragonfly with beautiful wings.  In vain he tried to keep his promise.  Flying back and forth over the pond, he peered down at his friends below.  Then he realized that even if they could see him they would not recognize such a radiant creature as one of their number.

The fact that we cannot see our loved ones or communicate with them after the transformation, which we call death, is no proof they cease to exist.    

Goodnight sweetheart.  I love you, and we’ll see each other again, sometime.  I’m sure of it.