No Time Limit on Grief

What did I come in here for?

The last few weeks have been a little rough emotionally as we make plans to have my husband’s ashes interred at the Dallas/Fort Worth National Cemetery. He is eligible due to his military service in the Air Force. He served four years between the Korean War and Vietnam, and was reactivated during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He used to laugh that his job then was in the Military Police, tracking down people who’d gone AWOL.

During Carl’s years in active service, his main job was as a cartographer. Using different colors and topographic symbols, a cartographer in the military draws maps to show natural and man-made features, allowing members of the military to visualize the landscape with the features in the right place. He did it by hand, but I imagine it’s done with computers now.

Anyway, he wasn’t sure how that experience of mapmaking qualified him for being in the military police later, but then he always said little makes sense when it comes to decisions made by the military or government.

I first met Carl before he was sent away during the missile crisis. Well, I didn’t actually meet him. I saw him walking past the window of an apartment unit where I was visiting my girlfriend. His air of confidence, as well as his good looks, caught my attention, and I asked my friend if she knew him. She was only aware that he lived next door to this apartment that was her brothers, but she didn’t know his name. Nor was she brave enough to go knock on the door with me.

I was too chicken to do it alone.

A few weeks later, we did meet when I was a roller-skating carhop at a small diner. He frequently drove his blue chevy filled with several friends into a spot, and I’d risk losing my job by staying out on the lot much longer than it took to deliver a few burgers and drinks.

Again, I was too chicken to ask him for a date, and I learned later that he was too chicken to ask me. 🙂

Obviously, we did finally connect, married and raised five kids. We spent 47 years together and weathered all the storms that marriage and parenting threw at us. The last twelve years that we shared out in the country on “Grandma’s Ranch” were peaceful and life-giving in so many ways. He was truly happy to be living in a rural area that he referred to as “pastoral.”

Because of my interest in the arts of all kinds, but especially the literary and dramatic arts, I quickly became super involved in the Winnsboro Center For the Arts where I was the theatre director for many years. Carl supported me one-hundred percent and eventually became a weekly volunteer to man the front desk and greet visitors every Thursday.

It was during one of his times there that he had a fatal heart attack on September 5, 2013.

One thing that has brought me a lot of comfort every year when the reality of all this hits me anew, is remembering the breakfast we shared the day he died. It was one of the best meals together in quite a while, and instead of reading, which had become a normal breakfast routine, we talked. It was a special, close time that ended with a tight, lingering hug and an “I love you.”

I’ve always been so grateful that he walked out the door with those words that day.

Carl was a mathematician. A computer programmer. A data-base developer. A husband. A father. And in the last 35 years of his life he was a Permanent Deacon in the Roman Catholic Church.

Next to his family, nothing filled his heart with more happiness than to be active in ministry to the poor, as well as his various liturgical and sacramental functions. The first time I heard him preach, I knew he’d found his niche. This man, who was normally quiet and introverted, became animated and spoke to a congregation of several hundred people with no hesitations or faltering over words. He told me later it was a God thing, and I believe it.

Through these years of missing him, I vacillate between missing him most as my husband, or as a father, or as a deacon – Servant of God.

Okay, I’ll be honest here. The husband role trumps the others, which is probably why I listed it first, and I have wonderful memories of those crazy years of raising kids, including what an important part he played in all that. Still, even today as I look at the picture of him at the altar that I have here in my office, my heart swells. His ministry nurtured a part of his soul that needed fertilizer.

This picture was taken shortly before he retired from the diaconate, just a few years before he died. Even though his health was failing, he resisted that retirement for a long time; unlike how thrilled he was to walk away from his salary-earning jobs. While part of me wanted him to stop, not to keep pushing himself, another part of me knew that even though his heart was failing, it still urged him to go on as long as he could.

It’s been eleven years today, September 5, 2024, and one of the years that the anniversary of his death falls on a Thursday, which makes it even more poignant for me.

People have hinted that I should be past it all now. It’s time to move on.

Well, there isn’t a time that we are “past it all now.” Or that we can “move on.” Not in the sense of moving on from remembering. From honoring. We learn to “live on” without them in our lives, but when you’ve lost a long-time partner in life, part of you is gone that you will never get back.

That’s the reality I acknowledge today, and I sincerely hope that it isn’t something that any of you reading this will have to experience for a long time. And if you have already, you have my sincere condolences.

That is all.