Our Futures Are Not Guaranteed

Recently I was sitting by Smith River in Oregon pondering on the getting older bit and the future we all paint in our minds.  Not one of us knows for sure how our story ends, and I suspect all of us carry around a draft version of it, the story we tell ourselves about what the future holds.  The picture of who will be chasing who in their wheelchairs.  What holidays and special occasions will look like.  Who we’ll call when something amazing happens, and who we’ll call when something goes straight to shit.  These are not things we generally write down.  Most of the time, I don’t even think we are aware we’re making them.  They are just there, below the surface, quietly becoming part of how we think the future will work.

Losing my Beautiful Bride shattered a lot of assumptions I held as unassailable truths.  The obvious one was losing her.  The less obvious one was losing the future I had built in my head around her being there for it.  I am not typing about some detailed 20 year plan backed up with a strategy document.  We didn’t have that, most folks don’t have that.  And if they do, I am questioning the sanity of that.  If we were to boil our plan all the way down to its essence, we simply had the expectation that whatever came next, we’d figure out that shit together, just like we figured everything else out.

I am realizing I not grieving a future that has been taken away from me.  I am grieving a future that never actually existed outside my own damn head.  Talk about getting stuck in your head, holy shit, what a realization.  The point being, all futures are imaginary, until they get here.  We cannot know what tomorrow will bring.  Hell, we can’t really even know what the next hour or next few minutes brings.  The strange thing is that most of us understand that intellectually and then proceed like it isn’t true.  A classic case of ostrich with its head in the sand.

We all make plans.   We tell ourselves story after story about how things are going to play out.  We picture retirement.  We picture anniversaries.  We picture who will be beside us when all of our hair is gone and strange noises start happening every time we get up.  And we picture all sorts of things that have yet to happen.  And none of that is wrong.  I think it is just part of being human.  We are wired to imagine what could be or will be. 

Maybe starting with possibilities is what all of us do.  Then slowly, over years and decades, they stop feeling like possibilities and start feeling like how the story is supposed to go.  Right up until life hits us with a harsh reality check.  Somewhere along the way, I quit thinking of my future with Sandy as one possible version of our story and started thinking it was the story.  That is a hell of thing to realize.  And once I saw that, I started wondering where else have I done the same thing.  Turns out, there are probably more places than I care to admit and that feels like something to work on. 

Over the last few months, I’ve started to suspect this isn’t just a widowhood lesson.  That happens to be how I learned it, but I don’t think it has exclusive rights to that.  I guess eventually everyone discovers they have been carrying around in their head a future that just doesn’t’ ever show up.  Sometimes that could be a marriage that didn’t work.  Sometimes it’s a stalled career or a dream that never materializes.  Sometimes it could be a dream that turns out to look nothing like the mental picture you’ve been carrying around.  Life is like an editor, always tinkering with the manuscript, without asking permission or even letting us know about the changes.

Sitting beside Smith River, I found myself wondering if maybe wisdom has less to do with predicting the future and more to do with holding it lightly.  We can dream about it, plan for it, even hope for it.  We just cannot confuse it with a promise.  Tomorrow is never a signed contract for any of us.  Losing someone teaches that lesson in the harshest way possible.   For a long time that realization felt depressing.  If the future isn’t guaranteed, if the story in my head isn’t necessarily the story I am going to get, what am I supposed to do with that?

The more I pondered, the more I started to wonder if maybe the answer wasn’t to stop dreaming about tomorrow.  The answer might just be as simple as not treating those dreams like they are a certainty.  The future I imagined with Sandy was one I looked forward to.  I still miss it and I probably always will.  At the same time, sitting there listening to the water go by, I can see something I couldn’t see years ago.  Just because that future never arrived doesn’t mean there aren’t other futures that are simply waiting for me to arrive in them.  Different ones, unexpected ones, and futures I can’t even imagine because they haven’t rolled into view, yet. 

And maybe that is where the lesson has been hiding.  We are supposed to make plans, we are built to be dreamers.  We were supposed to draw a picture of what might be waiting around the next corner.  We just have to remember that those pictures are sketches, not blueprints.  The future has never been guaranteed to any of us.  And maybe, just maybe, that isn’t a reason to fear what’s next, even when we have NO FUCKING IDEA what it might be.

Maybe we just have to be courageous enough to stay curious as hell about it.

My Hierarchy of Needs

And to be clear, I am not talking about only Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  Most folks are familiar with the pyramid, food, water, shelter and safety sits as the foundation.  As those needs are met, the focus shifts up the pyramid until we get to the top, self-actualization.  At this moment in my life, that does not feel like it quite fits me.  It fact, it almost feels backwards.  After losing Bride, I find myself asking a different set of questions.  Not simply what I need to live, the real bigger question is who I want to be in the world now. 

I feel self-actualization wants to be the foundation my other needs rest upon.  I could probably wrestle mine thinking into Maslow’s framework, and I am simply not going to do that.  Aside from exploring what I need, I also need to determine who I want to be in the world without Bride by my side.   For most of my adult life, many parts of that answer were already intertwined with being a husband.  I wasn’t just Smitty.  I was Bride’s husband.  We built a life together, shared dreams, solved problems, made plans, and grew into who we became side by side.  When she died, I wasn’t only grieving her, I was grieving a future and a version of myself that would never arrive.

Somewhere in that grief another question appeared.

Who do I want to be without Bride. 

For the first time in a very long time, I wasn’t sure I had an answer.   That’s an uncomfortable place to find yourself after decades of having a pretty good idea of who ya are.  Being a husband had been part of that answer for decades.  A lot of my other answers had been built around that one.  Not completely, and certainly not exclusively.  Yet it had become one of the foundation stones of who I understood myself to be. 

That feels bigger than self-actualization.  It feels like the foundation all of it should be resting upon. For me, this is a way bigger than a psychological exercise.   This is about cyphering out how to build a meaningful life in a future I never planned for.  I think that is why I have that pyramid upside down. 

When we are young, our needs often shape our identity.  We work hard to build security so we can become somebody.   We build careers, relationships, families, and communities.  We spend years stacking blocks on a foundation we hope will hold.  A job becomes a profession.  A profession becomes a career.  A relationship becomes a marriage.  Responsibilities become routines.  And before long, much of life is spent maintaining what we have built.

The question no longer seems to be what am I trying to build.  I have those T-shirts and this gig I have now will most likely be my last.  The question seems to be what all that building was for in the first place.  The first half of life is often about building.  Building careers, building families, and financial security.  Building reputations and a life.  For decades many of us are focused on adding the next brick to whatever we are constructing.  

Then one day something shifts.  Maybe it comes with age.  Maybe it comes with loss.  Maybe it comes when you realize there are fewer years ahead than behind.  Maybe it comes after you’ve achieved enough goals to realize the goals themselves aren’t the answer.  The question then becomes, what was all this building for?  Maybe that's the question nobody askes when we’re younger because we are too busy hauling bricks.  Was it to accumulate things?  Was it to collect accomplishments?  Was it checking the boxes?   Maybe.  The older I get, the more I think the hierarchy isn’t really about needs at all.  Maybe all those years were preparing me for something else entirely.   Not what I wanted to have, but maybe it's who I wanted to become. 

Am I healthy enough to enjoy the years I have left?  Am I spending enough time with the ones who matter most to me?  Am I contributing to something helpful.  Am I still learning?   Am I still curious?  Am I still able to create?  Am I investing in things that will outlast me?  Am I making room for joy?  Am I making room for love?  Am I becoming the kind of old man I’d like to hang out with?  

The funny thing is that I don’t feel like I’m starting over.  I hear folks talking about reinvention as if one morning ya wake up, thrown away everything that came before and voila, you become a brand new person.  I know that ain’t how that works.  At least not for me.  Every success, every mistake, every relationship, every heartbreak, every hard earned lesson has left its fingerprints on who I am.  I wouldn’t be me without all of it.

The older I get, the more I realize this season of life isn’t about becoming someone else.  It is about becoming a more intentional version of the person all those years were shaping me into in the first place.  Luckily I’m not building from scratch.  I've got a lot of material to work with.  I don’t need to tear the whole house down.  I need to decide what stays, what goes, what deserves a little more room than it used to have.  I’m standing inside a house built over many decades, looking around with a fresh set of eyes.  Some rooms still serve a purpose.  Some need repaired or repainted.  Some have become cluttered with things that once mattered, and matter less now.  And maybe there are a few rooms I have been meaning to build all along. 

The older I get, the less interested I am in accumulating and more interested in what I am aligning with.   Like aligning my time with my priorities.  Aligning my values with my actions.  Aligning my energy with the people and causes that matter the most to me.  I guess that is one of the gifts of aging, putting a stop to the asking what the world expects of me and asking more pointed questions about what matters to me.

I can stop chasing every opportunity and start choosing the ones that are truly worthy of my attention.  I am past the point of needing to prove myself, to anyone.  In these days I want to spend more time understanding this new self I am becoming better.  Maybe that is the real work on this part of the journey.  Not becoming someone new.  Not returning to who I once was.  Not living in the past or endlessly planning what’s next.  Maybe that’s where I've finally landed. 

What started as an attempt to rethink Maslow’s hierarchy of needs turned into a different question all together.  I spent a lot of time thinking about what I need, what matters, who I want to be, and what makes a life feel well lived.  In the end, I don’t think I am trying to build a better hierarchy.  I am pretty sure I am just trying to build a life worth growing into.   These days, success feels less like reaching the top of a pyramid and more like waking up grateful for what has been, curious about what could be, and intentional about who I am becoming.  If I can keep finding people to love, places to belong, things to learn, ways to serve and something worth building, then maybe everything else takes care of itself. 

At this stage of my life, I’m less interested in finding the perfect answer and more interested in creating a life worth growing into. 

I’ll keep ya posted.  

The First Three Sentences

If you were to walk into my bathroom, you’d see two wedding rings hanging from the mirror on a 3M Command hook.  One is Bride’s, the other is mine.  They hang together on a necklace I bought shortly after Sandy died.  I wore it with just her ring, then in August it carried just my ring.   Then, I put both our rings on it and hung it on the bathroom mirror where I could see it every morning and every night.  The surprising part wasn’t that I took it off, I knew I would eventually.  The interesting part is what taking it off meant.

Grief has a funny way of attaching itself to objects and my brain.  After Sandy died, I needed something tangible.  Something I could reach up and touch when the reality of what happened hit me all over again.   The necklace and the rings became that thing.  At first it was just her ring.  I would catch myself holding it when I was thinking about her.  I would reach for it without realizing I was doing it.  It wasn’t jewelry as much as it was a lifeline. I never intended to wear it forever.  And early on, I just couldn’t imagine the day I wouldn’t.  And then one day I took it off.  Not because of some grand decision.  Not because I was trying to prove anything.  The first time I took it off, I put it in a dish.  The second time I took it off, I hung it on the bathroom mirror.

Looking back, I think I was experimenting without realizing it.  For a while I thought the necklace was keeping me connected to Sandy.  What I eventually realized was that I wasn’t wearing it because I was afraid of losing her.  I was wearing it because I was afraid of what it would mean when I no longer needed it to remind me.  It took me much longer than I care to admit to understand what was happening.  Early on I thought the necklace was helping me hang on to Sandy.  I thought it was the thing keeping her close. 

She was in the stories I tell without even thinking about it.  I can hardly tell a story about Oregon or Florida without talking about Sandy.  Over half my best stories start out with “Bride and I”.  Sometimes I don’t even realize Ive mentioned her until someone else points it out. She was in the stories other people tell me that I’ve never heard before, like the origin story of her nickname Sam.  When you love someone for that many years, they eventually become woven into the fabric of our life.

There isn't a place to put them because they're already everywhere.  Every story I have from the last 38 years seems to start with Sandy somewhere in the first three sentences.  Sometimes it’s the first sentence.  And sometimes, she is the whole story.  Every major life decision has her fingerprints on it.  Her adventurousness was a major factor in why we moved to Oregon and Nebraska.  Every room in this house contains evidence she was here.  Every person who loved her carries a version of her that I don’t even know.

The longer she is gone, the more I realize how impossible she is to lose.  If Sandy is in every story, every room, every memory, every person who loved her, what exactly was I afraid of losing?   I took it off because at some point I realized the necklace wasn’t what was keeping her with me.  The necklace was just the reminder I needed in those early days.  I don’t need to carry the reminder anymore.

The truth is, hanging the necklace on the mirror wasn’t as peaceful as I am making it sound.  The first few mornings I would look at it and think, Really?  That’s where they fucking go now?  Part of me wanted to put it back on.  Not because I needed it around my neck or on my finger.  Because I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant that I didn’t.  I wore that ring for 36 years.  Taking it off felt a little like crossing a line I had not agreed to cross.  I didn’t feel healed.  I didn’t feel finished.  Mostly I just felt uncertain.  The same uncertainty I felt when I took off my wedding ring.  The same uncertainty that has followed me through every meaningful step I’ve taken since Sandy died.  It felt suspiciously like moving forward.  Grief however   has a way of making every step forward feel a little like disloyalty.

These days the rings and necklace hang from my bathroom mirror.  Every morning I see them while I’m getting ready for the day.  Every night I see them before I go to bed.  I thought taking them off might feel like letting go.  Instead, it felt like acknowledging something that had always been true.  Sandy was always everywhere.

 

One Hundred And Fifty Four Days

According to the interwebs, the battle of Guadalcanal lasted 154 days.  The Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war lasted 154 days.  There were 154 days between the election of Boris Yeltsin and the collapse of the Soviet Union.  And by 154 days after D-day, the outcome of World War II was no longer really in doubt.  Apparently 154 days is enough time to win wars, lose empires, reshape nations and change the course of human history.  It is also enough time to form a habit, and enough time to break one.   

Apparently 154 days is also enough time for the life you thought you were living to disappear.  One hundred and fifty four days ago, I lost my Beautiful Bride.  Today is my first wedding anniversary without her.  And if I am being honest, I don’t know what the fuck to do with that.

Thirty six years ago, on September 22^nd, I married the one and only love of my life.  Well, actually that’s not completely true.  We lived together for a couple of years before that, so depending on how you’re counting, we were committed to each other for thirty eight years.  Thirty eight years is a long time to share with someone.  At some point we crossed a line where we’d spent more time with each other than we had without each other.  I don’t think either of us ever imagined crossing back.  That was a strange thing to realize.  Part of who I understood myself to be disappeared with her.  I never imagined I’d have to learn how to be me again without her.  That is a long time to build routines.  A long time to collect private jokes and inside stories.  A long time to finish each other’s sentences.  A long time to just assume there would be another anniversary. 

And that is where I keep getting stuck.  Not that she died, she did.  I know she did.  Finding her was the worst moment in all of my life.  The calendar keeps telling me days, it says today is 154.  My heart still thinks I am waiting for her to come home.  Every fiber of my being says I should be celebrating today with my Honey.   And here we are, not celebrating, just me, myself and I, pecking away on my keyboard about her. 

And I hate that.  There, I fucking said it.  I hate that she died.  I hate that I know where her ashes are.  I hate that I can tell you about all the paperwork that needs doing following a death.  I hate that I know what it feels like to throw away her toothbrush.  I hate that there are people reading this who know exactly what I’m talking about.  I hate that there are people reading this who will find all this out someday. 

My brain bargaining with itself is an especially cruel part of this grief journey.  Because my mind keeps trying to negotiate contracts that reality has already voided.  I sometimes wonder what we’d have done differently if we’d known we only had a year left.  Or a month, or a day.  Or maybe even one minute.  Maybe then our last words to each other would have been something other than “love ya damn it”.  Then again, maybe they wouldn’t have.  The worst part is I honestly don’t know.  We’ve been saying “Love ya damn it” for years.  Truth is, “Love ya damn it” was a pretty good way to say goodbye.  This time though, we just didn’t know it was goodbye.  For a while, I thought that’s what was keeping me stuck.  The more I think about it though, the more I realize it isn’t.  

The problem isn’t that I don’t know she’s gone.  The problem is some part of me refuses to believe it.  I know exactly what happened.  I know how many certified copies of a death certificate ya need.  I know what it feels like to throw away a favorite pair of slippers.  And I know how to remove someone from the voter rolls.  I know all of these things, and more.  And somehow there is still a part of me that thinks she’s coming home.  The calendar says 154 days.  My heart refuses to admit anything other than she is running late. 

I keep looking for the version of the universe where I ask the right question, notice the right thing, make the right decision, and she comes home.  I haven’t found it, because it does not exist.  And I just keep looking for it anyway.  That’s the trap in all of this.  Every question leads me to the same place, and I don’t want to be in that place.  There is no version of this story where she comes home.  There is no hidden answer.  No loophole I can exploit.  No reset button.  No do over button to mash.  No miracle tucked away in the fine print.  Just the same harsh truth waiting for me.  Every.  Single.  Time.

The thing nobody tells ya about anniversaries is there is no place to put them.  A birthday belongs to one person.  An anniversary belongs to two.  When one of those people is gone, the day still shows up anyway.  Evidently September 22^nd did not receive the memo.  It arrived right on schedule, regardless of whether I wanted it to or not.

Today is our anniversary.  For all these years there was never any question about what that meant.  We’d go do something.  Maybe we’d head for the coast.  Maybe we’d stay somewhere nice.  We’d get dinner, and we’d laugh about stupid things.  I’d tell her I loved her, and she’d tell me she loved me.  It wasn’t complicated.  And now instead of that, I am sitting here writing something I never even considered I would be writing.    

This morning I did something that made perfect sense and absolutely no sense at all.  I went to a place called Cooks Café, Brides’ favorite breakfast joint here in Lincoln.  Claudia took my order.  Actually, she took two orders.  Mine and hers.  I ordered exactly what she would have ordered, three over medium eggs, hashbrowns, bacon, biscuits and gravy and a coffee. 

So, there I was, eating my breakfast while hers sat across from me getting cold.   I laughed at the twisted humor of that, she would have been pissed if her breakfast was cold.  I think I alternated between crying and silently laughing about the absurdity of what I was doing.  And there I was, in the middle of the restaurant.  I suspect I was making those around me uncomfortable, but I didn’t really care.  I finished my breakfast and asked for the check.  She asked if I wanted a to go box.  Then she asked if I was ok.  It’s a long story I almost said, instead I just said yes and the truth is no, I am not OK.  Somewhere between breakfast and lunch I realized I wasn’t feeding Bride.  I was feeding the part of me that still hasn’t accepted she isn’t coming home.

And then I did the same thing at lunch.  That played out pretty much the same way, except we both got the same thing, burnt ends lunch platter with Jalapeno cream corn. She loved the burnt ends at Mulberry's BBQ.  I got the same thing.  It seemed weird to dump that whole lunch platter in the trash on my way out.  I was going to cook a filet on the grill tonight but decided I would get the makings for a baloney sandwich.  At least once a year we’d eat those, shredded lettuce and mayo for me, and hot mustard for her.  I’ll have one of each later.  I hope this is not what our anniversary turns into because every bit of the day has fucking sucked.

In this moment, I honestly can’t decide what hurts more, that she’s gone or that this is what our anniversary looks like now.  The intellectual part of my brain understands every bit of this.  I understand that she died.  I understand that she’s not coming home.  I understand there won’t be another anniversary like the ones we had.  I understand why my side of the bed is the only side that gets slept on now.  I understand every single shitty fact about my new reality.

My heart though, it does not understand a fucking lick of it.  It just keeps arguing with the reality that will not change, no matter how hard I will it to change.   Understanding it and accepting it are two very different things.  So maybe that’s what all of this really comes down to.  Maybe it comes down to the fact that after thirty eight years together, I still have things I want to tell her.  On my recent trip to LA I saw some completely ridiculous shit and spent a half a second reaching for my phone to tell Bride about it.  I still catch myself turning towards a person who isn’t there anymore.  And just for a second, before reality catches up, everything feels normal again.  Then reality catches up.  One hundred and fifty four days later, grief still has a thousand faces.  Mostly it all boils right down to the same unavoidable truth.  I just really miss my Beautiful Bride.

Growing Older

The song Slowly popped into my playlist the other day, it’s about slowly growing older.  Nobody wakes up old.  It happens to us one ordinary day at a time.  We tend to spend most of our life planning for tomorrow and rarely notice it quietly rolling in.  When we are younger, growing older feels additive.  New experiences, new friends, new responsibilities, and more stories to tell.  Lately, I’ve realized growing older alone feels a little different.  It feels more like carrying those things that were once new.  For almost four decades I wasn’t growing older, we were growing older.  And I am learning, there is a difference.

Sandy and I had a shared vision of old age that included chasing each other around the nursing home in our wheelchairs.  We would joke about that often.  I am not sure at what point those jokes stopped being jokes and became the future I expected.  The version of older age I am living is different than either of us ever imagined.  Grief didn’t show up all at once, and neither has healing.  Both seem to be arriving the same way as old age, slowly.

I have touched on this before, but losing a spouse is bigger than just losing your person.  You also lose the version of the future that you’d been quietly building together.  I guess I took for granted what growing older might look like.  It had always looked like the two of us, the Smith’s.  And it was good to be a Smith.  It meant never wondering who was sitting in the control chair, who was riding shotgun in the Galaxie or who was holding my hand when life got hard.  It looked like a lifetime’s worth of inside jokes, funny stories, familiar routines and two people carrying the same history.  I guess somewhere along the way, the future Sandy and I imagined stopped feeling like a possibility and started feeling like the way the rest of our life would unfold.  I never considered a version that did not include Bride.   

What has surprised me over the last 147 days is that life has not stopped arriving.  New conversations kept happening, friendships kept deepening, and new memories kept on finding ways to be made.  What I didn’t understand at first was why that surprised me so much.  If you’d asked me a year ago what old age looked like, I would have described a life built around the two of us. 

When Sandy died, that future disappeared with her, or at least I thought it did.  For a while, I thought losing that future meant losing my future.  Over the last several months, life has  continued on, with little regard for how I happen to be feeling about it.  The future I expected is gone.  There is no use in pretending otherwise.  Some days I still catch myself reaching for pieces that will never be.  At the same time, another future has continued to show up whether I was ready for it or not.  Understanding that has been difficult because, truth be told, I haven’t fully accepted it.  Regardless of how many times I have heard “life goes on” I was just not prepared for the harsh reality of what that means after losing her.

Somewhere along the way, I realized I might be asking the wrong question.  Maybe the question isn’t, “how do I get back the future I lost?”  I can’t get that back.  That future belonged to us, and I now I am just me, myself, and I.  It seems the question now should be, “what do I do with this future that refuses to stop showing up?”  That one is still very much a work in progress.  I am beginning to think the answer starts with saying yes to people who keep showing up for me.  The friends who call, the ones who visit, the friends who will sit through the laughter and the tears.  The ones who keep proving I am not nearly alone as I once thought. 

What I understand now is that the story didn’t end when that future did.  The last several months have been filled with people who have refused to let me walk this road by myself.  Friends who showed up, friends who figured out how to show up for me, friends who sat with me when neither of us really knew what to say or how to say it.  In a strange, or maybe not so strange way, they have become part of this new future I had not planned for and never saw coming.  Not replacing anything, not substituting anything.  Just something different altogether.

Today, I think I would describe it differently.  I’d describe it as a collection of chosen and actual family choosing, again and again, to walk beside each other for a while.  To be clear, this is not the future I planned.  This is simply the future that arrived.  Different than the one we imagined.  And just like old age, just like grief, and just like healing, it seems to be arriving one ordinary day at a time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Smithlandia

Smithlandia was never really a destination for us.  It was just a place where life happened.  When we moved in 10 years ago, it felt like the name was waiting for us there amongst the cedars and doug firs.  We hauled all manner of things back that 3/8^th of a mile gravel driveway.  Groceries, plants, lumber for projects and old car parts.  We had all manner of things delivered, from UPS, USPS, FedEx and others.  It became our house right away.  Then, over time and a thousand ordinary days, it became our home.  Eventually, it became fully Smithlandia.

This week I carried a part of Sandy back there.  I dropped some of her ashes into Smith River, or Cedar Creek if you wanna listen what the county calls it.  We always called it Smith River.  That got me to wondering, what does it really mean to leave a part of someone in a place where they had already left so much of themselves? 

As her ashes hit the water, they swirled for a moment and then disappeared.  I was expecting the moment to feel larger somehow than it did in the few seconds it took.  More final maybe, or maybe more significant.  Instead, what struck me was how quickly they were gone.  Within seconds the current carried them away, and as they say, that was that.  Except it wasn’t. 

Standing there, I realized I had been thinking about this all wrong.  I thought the ashes were the thing I was bringing back to Smithlandia.  Watching them disappear made me realize that Smithlandia was already full of her.  Not necessarily in big dramatic moments, although there were some of those.  I am talking about the ordinary moments.  She was there in the driveway that we traveled thousands of times.  She was in the flowers.  She was in the projects, including the bridge replacement.  She was in every story, forever connected to every corner of every acre of this place.  I used to think places were sacred because something important happened there.  I wonder if maybe it has more to do with the life that accumulated over time.

After the ashes were gone, I kneeled there for a moment, water coming out of my eyeballs, and before I could pull myself back together, Jack’s hand landed on my shoulder.  No speech. No profound observation.  Just the two of us on a bridge of our own making, listening to Smith River do what it has always done.  Jack could not make this moment easier.  He couldn’t bring Sandy back.  He couldn’t fix anything.  What he could do was stand there with me.  Just the right person showing up at exactly the moment I needed him.  And sometimes, that is what love looks like.

It occurred to me a bit later that maybe this was part of what I had been discovering all afternoon.  Smithlandia wasn’t the only thing carrying traces of Sandy.  Jack was too.  So were the friends who sat on the ponder porch with us over the years.  So were the people who helped us build projects, celebrate victories, and weather hard seasons.  Smith River wasn’t the only place her life left a mark.  Sandy left a mark on Smithlandia, and on those who knew and loved her and shared that chapter of our lives.

Maybe that’s what all of us do if we’re lucky. 

We leave little pieces of ourselves behind in the places we love and in the people we share them with.

A bit later I found myself pondering one question in particular.  What exactly did I leave there this afternoon?  Not her.  The ashes, sure.  But those weren’t Sandy.  Sandy is still in the stories of that place.  She’s in the memory of hauling groceries and car parts up that gravel driveway.  She’s in the bridge we rebuilt ourselves.  She’s in the flowers.  And she’s in the house that slowly became Smithlandia.  She’s also in the people who shared that chapter of life with us.  She’s in the stories we still tell.  She’s in the lessons we learned along the way. 

Standing on the bridge over Smith River, I watched the ashes float away and realized the only part of Sandy I could lose sight of was the part I had just dropped into the water.  The rest of her remained exactly where it had always been.  In the place.  In the people.  In the stories.  She was everywhere I looked.  The physical evidence washed away.  The traces of love, it turns out, are indelible stains.

Sometimes It Shows Up As Presence

For pretty much all of my life, I’ve been the fixer of things.  The guy folks call when things ain’t working.  The guy who figures things out.   Restoring broken things has always been a hobby of mine.  I have restored old cars, old tools, rebuilt old grills and other things like that.  I have built a career on the back of fixing gadgets, high power radar systems, TV transmitters, computers, and all sorts of electronics.   I’ve spent just as much time fixing processes and workflows, growing teams, and chipping away at workplace cultures that create unnecessary stress and frustration.  I consider myself a fixer of many things.

I try very hard to put as much effort into fixing myself as well.   Using therapists, executive leadership and life coaches, as well as many mentors over the years.  All of those have required a lot of deep diving into who I am and how I can be a better version of me tomorrow than I am today.  I have made it part of who I am, to show up for those who are important to me.  I think this was never more true than it was for Bride, through her addition, and recovery journey as well as through her journey after the bipolar diagnosis.  Showing up almost became a reaction, and almost a response and the truth is it is probably somewhere between those two.

I was led to believe early in life that strength meant handling my own problems and not becoming a burden to others.  That is why I put in the work on myself, trying to be strong enough to carry my own load.  And then one day, life handed me something that was just too fucking heavy for me to carry by myself.  When Sandy died, the outpouring of support was overwhelming, and still is in many ways.  The texts, the random uber eats meal showing up, the daily check ins, the friends who call and sit with me in discomfort because none of us know how to talk about any of it.  And even the readers of this blog, all showed up.  I didn’t even have to ask, y’all just showed up for me in all the ways I needed someone to show up.

For me, and I suspect others, giving of ourselves feels comfortable.  It is a muscle I have built for those hard moments chosen and real family need support.  Receiving help, at least for me, makes me feel vulnerable and uncomfortable.  That is not necessarily a bad thing, it is just not something I am used to, not a muscle I have built up.  That got me to wondering, why does accepting help make me uncomfortable?  Why did I feel like I should be able to manage this on my own?  Why did every act of kindness feel like a debt I had to repay.  Was there some deep need to carry an invisible ledger, like there was to be some reconciliation at some future point by some unknown thing or person? 

I found thinking about this was weird and make me feel odd.  Was there some need to pay this back?  Or some feeling of indebtedness?  Or did I just not want to inconvenience anyone.  I know that no one is keeping a ledger, or somehow calculating the “cost” of friendship with me.  It is a silly premise, never once in my whole life have I thought about that when supporting those I love.  I kept coming back to what the fuck, where is that completely illogical bullshit  coming from?  

The longer I sat with that, the more I realized that my discomfort wasn’t about anyone owing anything.  I am beginning to think it is about identity.   Somewhere along the way, I started tying strength to independence.  I knew who I was when I was the one bringing the meal.  I knew who I was when I was working on the problem.  I knew who I was when I was carrying the weight.  I wasn’t nearly as sure who I was when I was the one needing help.  I doubt I am the only one who has ever felt this way.  I suspect a lot of folks who spend time taking care of others learn some version of that same lesson.  Strength meant managing problems.  Strength meant not asking for much.  Strength meant making sure everyone else was ok before worrying about myself.

That mindset worked well for me for most of my life, or at least I think it did.  Then life handed me the biggest load of shit to date.  Somewhere in the back of my mind, accepting help felt too much like admitting I couldn’t handle it.  Like needing help and failing were somehow the same thing.  That’s where I think I had it wrong.  Maybe it is really not as complicated as my over revving engineer brain is making it.  I am pretty durn sure that the people helping me are not trying to solve anything at all.  I am pretty sure they are simply trying to love me in the best way they know how.  Maybe receiving help isn’t about accepting what someone can do for me.  It is really about me allowing people who care about me a way to express that love in ways that don’t require awkward words to fix what hurts.  I don’t think I was ready for that at the beginning.  I know how to be the one showing up, or at least I thought I did.  I am still learning how to let others show up for me. 

As I write this, I am sitting in a kitchen in a small town outside Fresno visiting a dear friend, actually one of the oldest friends Sandy and I had.  The three of us met back in 1988 when we were all stationed in Annapolis.  She invited me out to hang out with her and her family,  and I came.  There has not been some grand moment of wisdom, no profound speech, no attempt to fix anything.  We’ve talked, we’ve laughed, we’ve shared memories and we’ve sat in comfortable silence.  Mostly she has simply been present.  And I’ve realized that presence may be one of the purest forms of love there is. 

From here I’m headed to Oregon to see another dear friend whose Bride is currently in hospice care.  In an odd way, this trip feels like both receiving and giving at the same time.  Allowing myself to be cared for by those who love me, and offering the same presence for someone walking a difficult road of their own. 

Maybe that’s what this trip is really about.  Not miles on a map or checking places off a list.  Maybe it’s learning how to let people I love show up for me in the same ways I have tried to show up for them over the years.  Sitting on Jennifer’s patio, laughing about stories that are forty years old, I’m beginning to realize that love does not always show with all the answers.  Sometimes it shows up as presence. I am still learning how to accept that.  And for the first time, I think that is perfectly ok.