yellow roses...

 Yellow roses were my mom's favorite.

On that morning 42 years ago today

when her children chose her flowers,

yellow roses blanketed her casket.

Today, my Lanny Love,

who never had the privilege of meeting her,

remembered me placing a yellow rose on her headstone

and bought me yellow roses in her memory.

This is the kind of thing that make the unique difficulties

that may accompany remarriage from widowhood worthwhile!

Today my heart has been tender with the heaviness of March.

Today, my Lanny Love,

whose own heart has experienced 

the newness found in the midst of longevity in grief,

understood my tenderness and easy tears

when talking about a dog and my children.

He understood that it was not about the dog,

it was about it being March

and the third of three hard days in this month.

And he remembered the yellow rose.

 

Love is a wonderful thing!

 

 

Becoming my first great love...

Sometimes I'm jealous of him...

He had the purity of 

the "love of his life"

and on that day, 47 years ago,

he married her.

On that same day,

as it turns out,

I married my first great love.

Sometimes I envy that he never loved another.

 

We were unique.

Oh, we'd had crushes,

boys and girls we thought were cute,

that made our tummies tumble when we saw them,

but love?

No.

On that July day in 1971,

at the tender ages of just-turned-14

and not-quite-16,

we made a "going steady" commitment

and no one else was ever more than a passing thought after that.

We were each the love of the other's life.

And on March 20, 1976,

when even the "passing thoughts" had long since ceased,

we got married,

promising before God and man

to love only one another for as long as we both lived.

We both kept that promise.

 

Then the darkest of dark January.

The day I said "see you later"

to the love of my life

and the door to another great love was opened,

one that, a bit more than two years later,

I would walk through.

And the love of my life

became my first great love.

 

This morning I woke myself calling his name,

memories flooding my mind,

my heart swelling with love for him. 

He has held my hand all day.

At the funeral we attended

where another cried through the "see you later"

to the chill of visiting him at the cemetery 

on this blustery first day of spring,

he has held my hand.

Today, and that "going steady" day in July,

are the days I feel the "love of my life" loss most acutely.

He is my first great love.

And a great love it was!!!

 

Sometimes I'm jealous of him...

 

Roots

Forgetting isn't the right word.

You most certainly do not forget!

Moving on is definitely not right.

That indicates leaving something behind,

and you take it with you.

Getting over it?

No.

You don't get over it.

Change.

Yes, that is right.

Grief changes.

 

It goes through seasons

like all our emotions.

In the beginning,

the ferocity is all-consuming, overwhelming,

physical in its intensity.

It is a dungeon existence,

a torturous state.

Unsustainable for healthy existence long-term.

 

Then it begins to ease 

and you feel appalled that it has,

you feel as if you are somehow betraying your beloved.

But you aren't.

 

Finally it settles into a permanence

that is mostly comfortable and familiar,

a path with peaks and valleys,

laughter and tears,

ordinary and extra-ordinary.

It is simply a piece of the quilt of your life.

 

Love is the same.

My Lanny Love and I are in our eighth year of marriage.

We don't have the "seven-year-itch"

that some experience with their seventh wedding anniversary

but our relationship is different than it was in those early days.

 

Love, like grief, is all emotion in the beginning.

It's an amusement park,

sparkling lights, dizzying heights, almost overwhelming excitement.

That is not sustainable long term!

 

Then the intensity begins to be replaced

by "like", deep respect, admiration.

Friendship deepens.

"Thrill" gives way to ordinary.

You might think "Uh-oh..."

but no, love is not waning,

emotion is simply calming,

love is strengthening, deepening, enriching!

The roots are improving, stretching, widening.

They are gaining the ability to support the height of true love

through the ordinariness of life,

the storms that are bound to come,

and the softening of emotion that comes with "everyday-ness".

It is in this state that people become appalled,

decide they are no longer in love

when in reality they are no longer at the amusement park

but rather, have come home!

What a tragedy to give up at that point

for this is where love becomes sustainable and permanent!

 

In a couple days,

I will commemorate the 47th anniversary of my wedding to my Al.

On that day so long ago,

I had no inkling that I would some 40 years later

create another wedding anniversary

with another great love.

I was 13 when we met that August Sunday in 1969,

14 the following summer when our love story began to root.

We had known each other for nearly 44 years at the time of his death.

We grew up together.

He knew me inside out, 

    upside down,

        backward and forward.

I will never be known like that again.

Once my Lanny Love and I moved "home",

I missed that.

I loved the excitement of our new and growing love!

But I missed being "known", 

"knowing" deeply for a long, long time.

I missed that instinctual recognition and knowledge of 

    what made me tick,

        what made him tick.

Last year we moved from the home I thought 

would be the one from which I would be buried.

Oh my, how I have longed for that place 

where our love took root!

How I missed knowing all the nooks and crannies,

all the little oddities and delights of the space,

    the double kitchen sinks, 

        the funny attic doors,

            the wonderfully eccentric neighbors,

                the music in the park drifting to the deck,

                    the porch swing and fragrant wisteria,

                        being able to walk around in the dark and not stub my toe.

 

But over the last few months,

that longing has begun to change,

more and more it has become a cauldron of delightful memories

of happy, sad, loving, growing times -

of two truly becoming one -

and the house we now occupy has become home.

I love my custom-to-me kitchen with it's wide counter-top,

    our cozy bedroom with it's intimate dark, twinkling ceiling,

        the cozy nook where I can rock and look out at our birds and "mountain",

            walking around, once again, in the dark without stubbing my toe.

Remarriage from widowhood is like that.

In the early days of my marriage to my Lanny Love,

I missed being "known" well.

And I missed "knowing" well.

I relished the excitement of early love, the amusement park,

but I missed the familiar comfort and contentment of home.

I am an emotion based individual.

As such, I "feel" deeply and have a tendency to

spend too much time at the amusement park of excitement

or in the dungeon of whatever negative emotion I am feeling,

give those places too much importance.

But through the years of two great loves,

two strong marriages,

I have learned.

Home is the best place to be!

 

My Lanny Love and I are home!

We have watered and fertilized our sapling,

it has grown tall and strong with deep, wide roots.

We visit the amusement park a lot,

we each occasionally find ourselves in the darkness for a moment,

but we are home! 

I love being home!

 

 

His mercies are new every morning...

As I begin this post,

our home is still and quiet,

the sky outside just beginning to show pale gray light.

The dog has had his morning romp

and is sleeping by the fireplace.

The kitties are snuggled on our bed with my Lanny Love.

I have spent an hour and half sitting in my cozy chair,

Bible, journal and book at the ready.

It has become one of my favorite times of day.

 

I am not a morning person.

I never have been.

If I didn't have to be up early,

I wasn't!

I used to sleep until late morning or early afternoon

on Saturdays and vacation days!

And even when I had to be up at O'dark-thirty for work,

I wasn't really awake until about 10am,

always scheduling rote tasks early

and brain tasks for mid-morning and later.

That part is similar still 

so the first part of my early mornings

always consist of time wasters like social media

until my brain both settles and wakes up.

So despite the fact that I am usually awake

sometime between 4:30am and 5:30am, 

I am still not a morning person.

 

I have occasionally wondered what changed.

Why, when I no longer have to be at work early,

do I wake and rise so early?

It always comes back to the same event:

becoming a widow.

A lot of things changed permanently with that one event.

 

Now, one wouldn't think there would be positives in widowhood

when one has been happily married.

But I'm a silver lining girl.

And I looked for those things in the early days.

Because not seeing the silver linings

didn't change a single thing.

I was still widowed if I didn't see them.

 

Once I got through that initial shocking, confusing, anguish,

I began, with the Holy Spirit's help,

looking for those bits of silver shining behind the dark, ominous clouds.

I remember one of the early silver lining realizations

was that I could pick up and and go whenever I wanted.

I love to travel, my Al did not

so while those trips were not pleasure trips

but rather grief-escape attempts,

still, I could simply decide on my own to go somewhere

and do it.

Small reward, it seemed, for an unwanted state,

but a silver lining nonetheless so I embraced it.

I learned to look for those things and,

after a while,

I didn't have to look so hard.

I simply saw and appreciated them.

I still do.

 

There has been a lot of permanent silver since my widowhood.

The silver I most embrace and nurture is relationship,

specifically, my relationship with God

and my relationship with my Lanny Love.

 

I am different now.

I must honestly say

I didn't appreciate what I had in my marriage to Al.

Or probably any of my relationships, truth be told.

But now I know more fully...

 

Life is fragile!

 

Those irritations and inconveniences are minor!

They should be counted as joyous opportunities

to serve one's people and grow love!

 

I am a better wife to my Lanny Love

than I was to my Al.

That makes me sad.

And glad.

 

It is my habit when I wake in the mornings

to lie in bed for a half hour

until I can have coffee

(I take a pill that requires the wait...)

During that time,

I love snuggling up against my Lanny Love,

    feeling his warmth,

        hearing his heart beat,

            listening to his deep, steady breaths,

                thanking my God for His unending mercy,

                    His greatest gift but salvation.

                        My Lanny Love.

 

 

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases;

His mercies never come to an end;

they are new every morning;

great is your faithfulness.

                                ~~ Lamentations 3: 22-23 ~~