Our First Anniversary

My beloved,

A year ago at this time, just shy of 3 AM, you might have been awake, sleepless, knowing that, if at all possible, this would be the day you left this incarnation.

As it turned out, I was awake also, probably, as I am now, having coffee and writing in my journal. Although ready to resume sleep in a couple of hours, I couldn’t do so until (our daily ritual) you came downstairs and snuggled into my bed and I brought you coffee in your mug, the mug from which I drink mine every morning since.

I gave you, unknowingly, the gift you were looking for: a time when I would be otherwise out of the picture so that you might end your physical life. I said, “I’ve been up a while and need a nap.” I have no idea whether you drank your coffee, for later I found your cup clean and in the drying rack, but by the time I awoke from my nap an hour and a half later you were dead.

I’m grateful that you knew that, however unsettling your death might be for me, my devotion to God would allow me to use it to serve that devotion. And so I could be the friend to you encapsulated in that poster of yours that, from our first meeting 46 years ago now, defined our bond:

A friend is someone

who leaves you with all your freedom intact,

but who, by what he thinks of you,

obliges you to be fully who you are.

I’m grateful I had no way of knowing the degree to which your absence has, and will continue to indefinitely, reconfigure every aspect of my life. I’m grateful my fear didn’t lead me to make your choice more difficult by me saying, “Are you aware of what you’re setting in motion here?”

It’s a funny thing to say but your death has been one of the great gifts of this life in that it increases the intensity by which I address my purpose, the purpose we share: knowing God. The loss of you in familiar form has led to the loss of so many other familiars. Yet, in the process, I have felt your presence intensifying the dramatic stripping away of everything that isn’t just me and God.

I live in the sea of unknowing where anything but the thought of God is painful. And I know I feel that way, in part, because of your loving spirit caressing me.

As I said at your memorial, my heart is broken, and I don’t ever want it to mend.