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.

Turns Out Writing Is How I Listen

I was texting with a friend recently about my recent blog on loneliness.  They said I was able to put words to a feeling they sit with often.  They went through a divorce a couple of years ago that included relocating quite some distance away.  They also mentioned that I was inspiring them to write.  I encouraged them to do exactly that, even if they didn’t publish anything like I have done mine.  The conversation got me thinking about something I already knew but didn’t have all the words for.  I was reminded that I didn’t start this blog because I thought I had any answers.  Most days I’m trying to figure things out pretty much in real time.  In fact, I’ve discovered that many of the things I write about aren’t things I already know.  They’re things I find out while I am pecking on the keyboard. 

Looking back, I figured that out decades ago.  For as long as I can remember, I’ve done a lot of wandering around inside my own head.  I can spend days overthinking things, turning it over and over again, running down rabbit holes and revisiting conversations that ended a long time ago.  As a buddy of mine would say, “I think we have kicked that particular horse to liquefaction.”  I used to think writing was what happened after all that processing was done.  Think about, figure it out, and then peck away on a keyboard. 

I have known for a while that typing it out helps me, and since Sandy died, it has become clear that the writing is where the real processing is happening.  Thoughts floating around in my head tend to stay half formed, kinda like puzzle pieces scattered on the table.  Once they hit the keyboard, they slow down long enough for me to look at them.  The connections start to appear, things I thought I had a good grip on take on a different meaning.  Things I didn’t realize were bugging me suddenly pop up.   Some of the biggest things I’ve learned about grief, loneliness, friendship, gratitude, marriage, and myself weren’t conclusions I sat down with.  They were discoveries that showed up somewhere around paragraph 3.

It might not be apparent to Y’all, but many times these posts start in one place and end up in an entirely different place.  What begins as a story about an old photograph, a song on the radio, an empty chair, or a cup sitting on the counter often becomes some new discovery about myself.  The story gets me started, the writing helps me figure out where I was actually headed.  I see this progressing in my posts, especially since April, which hardly makes sense to me, and here we are anyway.  The object or the story was almost never the point.  It was just the thread I started yanking on. 

I think that is why I keep writing.  Not because I have some great wisdom to share, and certainly not because I have life all figured out.  That is definitely not the case.  If anything, the older I get the more comfortable I become admitting that I don’t.   What writing gives me is a chance to slow down long enough to pay attention to what’s happening in my body and brain.  Life in general moves along at a blistering pace.  Thoughts come and go, feelings show up, make a mess of things and then run off and hide in the corner.  Writing forces me to wander my ass over to that dark corner and sit with those feelings for a while.  And that forces the questions I wasn’t planning on being asked, and that I have even less of an idea how to answer.

One of the surprising parts has been discovering that the things I am learning along the way aren’t always mine alone.  Time after time someone reaches out and says, “I thought I was the only one who felt that way” or “I didn’t know how to put that into words until I read what you wrote.”  Or just the many little notes of appreciation for writing these posts and  sharing them with the world on my little blog.  Most times I find it a bit odd because I am usually trying to make sense of my own thoughts when I start typing.   Somehow, in the process of listening to myself, other people hear parts of their own story too.

Maybe that’s because the things we carry around aren’t nearly as unique as we like to think they are.  The whole human condition thing and all.  The details may vary, the names change, and the stories are different.  One person may be grieving the loss of a spouse, another is grieving a marriage that ended and a life journey diverted.  Someone else might have lost a parent, or a close friend.  For others it could be a dream that didn’t work out the way they had hoped.  The circumstances are different, and the feelings underneath most of the time are not.  Whatever it was that I uncovered while pecking away on the keyboard is usually something they see in themselves.   

Maybe that’s what kept rattling around in my head after we finished texting.  Not because they complimented my writing.  What stuck with me was the realization that they had seen a piece of themselves in something I wrote while trying to understand myself.  That’s kind of amazing when ya stop and ponder on it for a moment. 

Two people living very different lives, carrying different stories and different scars, somehow finding common ground in places neither of us would have chosen to visit.  It felt like one of those rare moments when two people realize they’ve been carrying the same thing, even if they arrived there on different roads.  Maybe I wasn’t trying to understand myself after all.  Maybe the thing I keep finding in these stories isn’t answers.  It’s connection.  Because when somebody says, “Yeah, I know that feeling,” you realize that neither of us are quite as alone as we might have thought we were. 

Here is the Oratory that started it all. 

She Really Was Something!

So, a bit of the mechanics behind these blogs.  Most of the time an idea pops into my head and I write one sentence for each paragraph, then build the story.  Sometimes all of the original sentences get revised so much they are unrecognizable.   Other times it’s just a stream of consciousness that I then refine and edit down.   Most of what I have written over the last 17 years has started in one of those two ways. 

Today’s story is different, today’s story started with only the title.  I was talking to one of Bride’s best friends recently and she said, “she really was something”.  That hit me like a ton of bricks, mostly because she really was something.  I am still stunned she picked me for the journey.  That alone really is something.    

So, I tell you all of that because this one may feel different than the others.  Who knows though, by the time I am done, maybe it will feel just like all the other ones.  I’ve got more examples of how she really was something, so there might be another one or two of these posts.  Maybe not, maybe I will have satisfied my itch to share why she really was something special.

She was something else.  She had a fierce kind of love, the kind ya don’t learn, the kind you’re born carrying.  That means a lot of things, active protection of those she loved, yes.  Radical honesty, yes.  Unwavering commitment to those she loved, she was all in.  Her kind of love was not passive, it was not purely a romantic feeling either, although it had that in spades.  She would not allow anyone to disrespect me, ever.  It was like you could see the hairs on her neck stand up and her stance shift to fighting mode if someone did, even a little. 

I remember we were out to eat and the server made some attitude based comment to me about my order.  It was probably because I am a terminal smart ass and said something stupid.  Their comment slid right off me.  She was on that dude like white on rice, and he eventually apologized.  Didn’t matter, we left but not before she had some words to the manager.  For me, it was a small slight and I was hungry and I would have been more forgiving about it.  She took offense and took action.  That was a long time ago, I don’t even remember where we were at, or where we went next. 

She was something else.  She worked harder than I do to keep relationships working, especially when they are contentious. She held family tight, and worked hard at curating those relationships.  She did the same thing with all her friends as well.  She somehow figured out how to set aside differences, egos and pretty much any obstacle that stood between her and a relationship she held dear.  She was much better at that than me by a country mile.

She was something else.  She was as fearless a human as I have ever known.  There are so many examples that it is sometimes hard to pick one specifically.  She wore that fearlessness like an oversized T-shirt and it permeated who she was.  It showed up always and forever in large and small ways.  From detoxing in bootcamp, to admitting herself into rehab and telling them don’t let me out until you feel I am better, 34 days later she came home.  Through being Baker Acted by her doctors, which was hard on her. 

She came out the other side of that stronger than before, learned a lot of lessons and did not let that slow her down.  She started a blog, SoSaysSandy.com, where she started telling her stories to the world.  Something that a lesser human would have been embarrassed by, she wore as a badge of courage.  After a few months, she stopped and had me delete the posts.  I just unpublished the blog and those couple of posts are equally powerful and I may end up posting them here.

She was something else.  She would call me on my bullshit, in a lickety split sort of way.  That fierce loyalty didn’t mean blind agreement.  If I was being a stubborn ass, she would tell me to knock it off.  If I was being an idiot, which happens a lot with me, she would definitely call that out for me.  Sometimes immediately and often very firmly.  Looking back a lot of my better decisions happened because she was willing to tell me something I didn’t particularly want to hear.  That kind of honesty is a gift, even when it arrived wrapped up in 80 grit sandpaper.       

When I think about our shared bit of the journey, I feel so fortunate that I was the human she picked.  We tried hard not to take any bit of our ride for for granite, that was not a misspelling, that is what she called it.  Looking back, I wonder how well I held up my part of that bargain.  I refuse to beat myself up over that, but I can see spots where I could have been a better husband and partner for her.  I guess that is the advantage of hindsight.  Maybe it’s not advantage, maybe it is closer to torture, at least that is how I am viewing it at this moment.

The funny thing is, I started writing this one because someone said, “she really was something.”  By the time I got there, I realized I hadn’t even scratched the surface.  Every example I type out reminds me of three more.  I finish one thought and think, yeah, but there was also that time…

That’s the problem, trying to explain someone who filled up every room the way she did is a fools errand.  Every moment feels important, but every memory feels incomplete.  No single story can hold the whole person, especially her. 

Maybe that’s why that simple sentence hit me so hard.  “She really was something.”  Not simply brilliant, not simply fearless, not simply stubborn, not simply resilient.  

Something.

Somehow that single word manages to carry all of it.  Fierce love.  The fights she was willing to fight.  The relationships she refused to give up on. The courage it took to stand back up after life knocked her flat on her ass.

All of it somehow fits inside that one little word.  She really was something.  

And man, was I lucky she picked me

The First 100 Days

People like milestones.  The first 100 days of a Presidency.  The first 100 days of a new CEO.  The first 100 days of a major project.   Me being me, I like to count things so as of today, I’ve been a widower for 100 days.  It still feels very weird to call myself that, and I think that is the first time I have typed it.  WEIRD!  Anyway, I can’t say I’d recommend the role or the title. 

A hundred days feels like it should be enough time to have some answers.  Long enough to figure out a few things.  But the one thing I have learned is that grief does not give a shit about 100 days, or any calendar dates either.  Some days feel normal.  Other days a song, a picture, and old text message have knocked me to my knees.  I’ve spent 100 days laughing at memories, crying over memories and doing both at the same time.  That’s what a widower does I guess, see aforementioned comment on not recommending it. 

Over the last hundred days I’ve sifted through thousands of pictures, electronic and printed.  I’ve listened to songs that have become time machines and others that have become anthems.  I’ve told Bride stories and I’ve heard new Bride stories and rediscovered a few stories I had forgotten all together.  I thought I was looking for comfort.  What I found was something else, I found proof.  Proof we had a great marriage.  Proof we laughed a lot at a lot of different things.  Proof we had far more adventures than I remembered.  Proof that the years together we were blessed with were even richer than they felt while we were living it.  We started as friends in what we called the anti relationship.  Looking back I think that lack of pressure became one of the foundations of our success as partners.  

The thing about evidence is that it lives in the details.  Somewhere in the thousands of pictures was another picture of Bride making a face at the camera because she hated posed pictures.  And then there were text exchanges that would make absolutely no sense to anyone else but had me laughing out loud anyway.  Tiny moments that, when woven together, told a bigger story.  The puppy love from those early days eventually became much deeper.  We wore our marriage like an old shirt.  Soft, comfortable and known in ways we can’t know new shirts.  We knew the story behind each stain, every loose thread and every hole.  The knowing was what made it so comfortable.

The second thing I learned is that grief doesn’t move in a straight line.  Finding all of that proof didn’t make the hurt smaller.  That surprised me.  I think I expected memories to provide comfort.  Instead, they sharpened the loss.  The more evidence I found of how wonderful our life was, the more obvious her absence became.  Every picture I found of us laughing carried another message right behind it.  You don’t get to do this anymore Smitty.  And that fucking sucks.  Early on I think I was expecting this grief journey to be like a recovery journey.  Where ya start in a bad place and gradually move towards a better one.   Grief has not worked that way. 

It feels less like a straight line and more like the tide.  Some days are calm, some days it feels like a rip tide carrying me out into water I don’t recognize.  What I started to realize is that the hard days don’t mean I’m moving backwards.  Most of the time they mean I’ve stumbled across something important.  A memory, a picture, a story, or some other piece of evidence of the life we built together.  One hundred days in, I have stopped measuring success by whether a day hurts.  The hurt comes on its own schedule, and I don’t have access to change the cadence.  What matters is what comes with the hurt.  More often than not, it brings a memory worth keeping. 

Which leads me to the third thing I’ve learned.  Memories are both medicine and salt.  I used to think memories were just something we held onto.  A collection of stories and moments we can take out and enjoy whenever we need them.  What I’ve learned is that memories are far more powerful than that.  They can heal and hurt at exactly the same time.  Through all the photos, text messages emails, social posts and all the other little breadcrumbs of our life, I have laughed so hard I couldn’t see straight.  Others hit me like a train on a mission and others managed to do both within moments of each other.

A picture of us on Canon Beach when we came out for my interview for the OPB gig reminds me of how much fun we had.  It also reminds me there won’t be any more new adventures with her.  A recording of her from when dear friends visited lets me hear her voice, and her laugh.  It also reminds me how long it has been since I heard that in real life.  Stories from friends let me see her through someone else’s eyes, and that is just as beautiful.  It also hurts.  The gift and cost arrive together, damn it.  I am starting to understand why memories can feel so confusing.  We tend to think happiness and sadness are opposites.  In grief they are more like roommates. 

For most of my life I have assumed the goal was to make sadness smaller.   What I am slowly learning is that sadness isn’t crowding out happiness.   The sadness exists because of the happiness.  One turns out to be evidence of the other.   There are days it would be easier not to look.  Easier to not open the photo album.  Easier to not play the song.  Easier to not revisit the conversation.  But every time I do, I discover something waiting for me on the other side.  A laugh I needed, a story I forgot, another piece of proof. 

Looking back I finally understood why I kept digging.  I told myself I was looking for memories because I was afraid of losing them.  Afraid if I didn’t gather up every picture, every text message, every story, some piece of Bride might slowly fade away.  I think part of me was afraid time would sand off the edges.  That years from now I’d remember the outline of our life together and lose the details.

What I discovered was that the details were everywhere.  In pictures, in text messages, in stories, in thousands of ordinary moments I had completely forgotten.  The evidence wasn’t fragile, it was overwhelming.  And maybe this is the biggest thing the first 100 days have taught me.  Grief doesn’t move in a straight line.  Memories can heal and hurt at the exact same moment.  And love leaves an evidence behind.  When I started digging through our life together in pictures, I thought I was looking for memories.  What I found was proof.  Proof what we had was real.  Proof that it mattered, and proof I was luckier than most. 

A hundred days wasn’t enough to find the answers, but it was enough to remind me how damn lucky I was and how grateful I am.

Damn, I miss that Gurl

This was from when we said our vows again at 20 years in.  Here is a link to what I wrote about that then.  I hadn't read that for a while, it made me cry.

https://mroatmealsoratories.blogspot.com/2010/09/i-recently-experienced-most-special-day.html

A Tough Few Days, A Wonderful Life

Sometimes a single picture is all it takes to ruin your day.   On Thursday morning I saw a picture come up in the Facebook memories thing of Bride.  She of course was beautiful but also was very happy in the picture.  Not sure what were doing or where we were going but she was happy about it.  That was the start of a spiral for me and I took the day off.  I spent all day perusing digital photos in my phone and hers.  We shared so many memories and so many experiences and so many adventures together.  Then on Friday I remembered that I had set both our phones up years and years ago to automatically upload our photos to a drop box account.  Pretty much every picture either one of us took since 2007/2008 was there.

Friday, I spent the day digging through even more memories in digital format.  I found so many pictures, or her, of us, and of us with family and friends.  I sent out a few to folks who were in them, I laughed and cried and did a lot of both.  One of the things that made me laugh was how many selfies she took of herself.  One of two things was happening, I’m pretty sure.  I’m pretty sure she was using her phone as a mirror and just hit the button.  The other one is, and this makes me laugh, is that she would take pictures to send to her friends or sisters to get their opinion on a new hair style, or new earrings or blouse. 

Hahaha, she had a face she made when she took those pictures, I’m not sharing em but for those who got them, you know what I’m talking about.  What struck me rummaging through our life in pictures wasn’t the pictures themselves.  It was that each one represented a tiny moment in her day that she thought was worth sharing with someone she loved.  There must have been hundreds of them.  Looking through them felt less like looking at selfies and more like seeing little glimpses of her personality scattered across the years.  The overwhelming takeaway was how much fun she was having, whether trying on earrings, showing off a new haircut or taking a picture for no reason at all.  Bride just looked happy in all of them. 

We watched the sunset a lot together, our favorite place was a park with a boat ramp that was close to our home in Jax.  We watched sunrises together but not as much, she was less a morning person than me.  So many moments where she’d be wearing that beautiful smile.  I swear I can hear that laughter coming from her, the laughter that was so contagious, and that I loved.  Looking at picture after picture I realized we spent an awful lot of time just sitting next to each other watching the sun go down and dumbasses trying to get their boats loaded up.  We enjoyed those things, of course, but at the end of the day, we just liked hanging with each other.

I had also completely forgotten how many tiaras she owned.  Apparently, it was a shocking number.  I even got her one that spelled out Bride that was bedazzled.  I remember once we were out to dinner and she had a pretty festive one on, the waitress asked what the occasion was.  With a straight face, and a tiara on her head, she says “why would you ask that?”  That created an awkward moment, and she never acknowledged it was anything but normal for her to have it on.  Looking through all those pictures, I realized the tiaras were probably not about the tiaras.  They were just another example of Bride being Bride.  If she thought something was fun, or cool, she did it.  She wasn’t one for waiting for permission or worrying about whether anyone might think it was silly, she just enjoyed it.

I found one picture of when we redid our bathroom and were hanging a big mirror up.  Well before we did, we decided to sign and date the wall for someone in the future to find.  She signed hers with Ham, a nickname she ended up with when we were still dating that stuck all the way through.  I think I have written about her being called Sam by her family.  I learned from her older sister the origin story of that at her celebration of life.  Anyway, I called her honey a lot, and one time I couldn’t get Sam or Honey out and voila, the first Ham was born.  That eventually turned into Hamster.  

Those were a couple of my pet names I had for her.  We’d say Ham and Kins, together again any time we got back to together after being apart.  I got a Tee shirt made at a shop in the mall that said “Smittykins little Hamster”.  Looking at that picture just reinforced how much of our marriage existed in a language that probably sounded ridiculous to everyone else.  Nicknames, phrases, inside jokes, little traditions that developed over the years we spent together.  We built an entire vocabulary that only we knew.  At the time it felt completely normal to us.  Looking back, those little things were a big part of what made our relationship uniquely ours.

Looking back, I realized the nose ring was a lot like the tiaras.  Just one more example of Bride being Bride.  Most people spend their lives worrying about what others think about them, not Sandy.  She instead spent her time deciding what sounded fun and doing that instead.  Looking at those pictures reminded me that Bride was never done becoming herself.  She gave herself permission to enjoy her life in a way that I always admired and tried to emulate.

Saturday, I dug out some boxes of actual pictures from dating back to before we got married.  Pictures of us when we all lived in the barracks and spent time at the rec center, playing pool, cooking on the pit and playing one handed volley ball.  I also remember making some pretty big breakfasts over there as well.  Two kids, with no idea where life would take us.  We often wondered about the folks we were stationed with, if any of them could have predicted we would have made it.  Looking at those pictures now, I am not sure we could have imagined all the places we would go, all the people we’d meet or all the memories we would make together. 

This picture stood out more than most for a few reasons.   

First, this was her burfday in 2025 and it was one of the ones we were not together.  She of course had a taira on.  And she was also in the hospital in Texas, she had fallen and bonked her head, I went when that happened but because they had to drill holes in head to relieve the pressure, it was scary.  She also could not could fly back with me to Oregon right away, and I had to work. 

None of that is what caught my eye in this picture though.  What jumps out to me is her face.  She was getting a present, or as she called them prizes.  She loved prizes.  There was something wonderfully childlike about the way she reacted when she got a prize, regardless of what it was.  For a little while she’d light up like a kid on Christmas morning.  Looking at that picture now, I can still see that joy.  I loved that about her.  And if I am being honest, the thought of never experiencing that again makes my heart hurt. 

I went on a scavenger hunt looking for memories because I was missing her.  What I ended up finding was overwhelming evidence that we had a wonderful, ridiculous and joyful life together.  Not a perfect life, not a storybook life.  It was simply just our real life.  A life filled with laughter, adventures, love, family, friends, and countless little moments that seemed ordinary at the time, but now mean everything.  I guess that’s the price of admission, missing them when we loved them so much.  But after spending a few days wandering through our memories, I can honestly say it was worth every penny and I would gladly pay it again.  Because the truth is, I am so grateful for the time we got together.

Damn it, I miss her.  Man did we have a hell of an adventure.    

The Contacts you Never Delete

So, a couple of months in and I have not yet turned off Bride’s phone, and I am not sure when I will.  We shifted to consumer cellular a couple of years ago and it is only about 20 bucks a month to keep it active so...  We both have the same code to get into our phones and iPads.  I had never looked in her phone before she passed, and I don’t think she ever looked in mine, even though we both had the codes.  I have been checking her phone daily for calls, voicemails, text messages, Amazon activities and any other form of communications looking for anything that needed attention.  There have been a few things that needed to be addressed in those first few weeks but nothing lately.

We had recently replaced her phone with the latest iPhone Max, the big one, the $1,500 one.   Before that, her phone was older than mine, an iPhone 7 from around 2017 or so I think.  We both hang on to them until they started giving us problems, so we always tried to get the newest thing they had out.  I have the Galaxie Note 20 Ultra that I got in 2020 and I’m on my second Otter Box case.  It still answers phone calls and texts along with email, when I feel like using it for that.  I have looked through her pics and email and what not, mostly because I saw the .99 cent charge for cloud storage come in.  I am working on getting that stuff moved off her account so I can at least stop paying that 99 cents a month for storage.  

Along those lines, this morning I was reviewing her contacts to see if I needed to transfer any of those to my contacts.  I found some and sent them over to me.  One thing I was not really prepared for was finding contact info on friends no longer with us.  My Mom and Dad were there, as was Debbie, Carol, and a couple of others.  That one stopped me for a moment, and pushed me to look through my contacts to find who all I still have in there.  It was too many, and now Bride sits on the top of that list, and that fucking sucks.  So do Lyndon and Alison, my two oldest friends.  I met Alison when I was 4 and Lyndon when I was 5, she died in 2013 and he died in 2015 and I still miss them both.  If you type in Mom, Dad, Lyndon, or Alison in the little search box up in the top left corner you can read some words I wrote about them.

There was Grady, and Cary, two friends who decided this life wound up to be too hard.  I was mad at both of them for a long time, but I think with age I have learned to accept that was the choice they made.  My Mom and Dad are still in there.  There is Bob, Bishop and Brian.  Chris,  Debbie, and Don.  Doug, Eric, and Jimmy.  Ken, Larry, and Mark.  Michael, Pat, and Peter.  Randy, Roy, and Russ.  Tim, Tracy, and Wayne.

Twenty eight names in total, just sitting there in my contacts.  People that I have simply kept their contact info in my phone, even though some have been gone for decades.  It was funny because at least a few I must have transferred their contact information from an address book.  For those younger folks, that was a cardboard bound binder with places where we put people’s names, phone numbers and addresses, along with any other pertinent information.  I always picked green ones, although I cannot recall why now but there must have been a reason.

That’s when it stopped feeling like just a list. A contact list isn’t just for finding folks, it’s also an archive of the ones who shaped our lives.  Keeping someone in our contacts feels like a small act of defiance.  Kinda like we’re just not willing to let them disappear.  We spend years, in some cases a lifetime, building connections to those who end up being in our circle of humans.  We used to memorize the numbers of those closest to us, for example, I recall Lyndon’s number when we were kids being 513.663.6382. 

Now when their name pops up on our device with a text or call, we associate it with a voice, a laugh, or some memory and our heart does a little dance, especially if we have not heard from them in a while.  Deleting that name can feel like collapsing all of that history into a single, final button mash.  Leaving it in there lets the relationship breathe, exist in a different state, not active, but not erased either.  Just different.

It lines up with how memory actually works, at least for me.  Grief is not linear, and connection isn’t either.  Some days I don’t even think about them at all, other days their name pops up unexpectedly via some random trigger.  When they pop up, it can bring back a flood of memories I didn’t even realize I was carrying.  Seeing their contact does not anchor me in the past, it just keeps the electronic door open for me.  Not to stay there, but to revisit from time to time, long enough to share a laugh or even a cry with them, like what happened to me as I looked through it today.  The relationship changes, it goes from talking to them to pondering about them. 

There is something real about how our contacts list keeps growing while some of those names will never be called again, a pretty stark reality for a “contact” list.  Life keeps adding chapters but does not delete the old chapters.  Those old chapters just take on a different weight.  It almost becomes a map of all the intersections in our lives, showing where we met that first friend and how the list grew from there.  The map is also marked with the moments in time and place where folks got off our ride.  Keeping them in there acknowledges that those relationships did not end in importance to us, they ended because they ended in time.

Maybe most of all, it’s about control in a moment where so much feels out of our control.  Choosing not to delete a name is a deliberate act, as is deleting one.  I don’t think it’s denial at all, I think it is more about choosing what stays.  It is a decision they still belong in our world, even if the way they exist in it has changed.  Their name sitting there when ya scroll, as hard as it might be, shows how much that particular human meant to us when they were here.

Maybe there is a right time to remove someone, and for me I guess I learned that time is never going to be right.  Keeping them in there isn’t about reaching out, it’s just not being ready to let them go.  Who do you have in your contacts?

This is Bride's phone

The Power of a Box

This is a repost from something I put on FB on May 4th over to here.

Last night I received the text and picture below from a Brother from another Mother, we talked afterwards. Damn dude, thanks for the cry and I love ya!  ❤️❤️

The Power of a Box

It is not only the label on a box that describes what is in it, it is also the quality of the box that represents the importance of what is contained within.

This is a beautiful box inside and out.

Outside the craftsmanship is up to the Smitty standard.

Inside the box is pure beauty, dreams, memories, great times, kindness, courage, boldness, love, laughs and beyond the Smitty standard.

The Power of this Box is beyond words.