The Aftermath- Afterlife- Without Lynn

   There is a question that gnaws at me day and night, lately.  Did I really think that taking care of my wife through this insidious disease was going to be the hardest part of it?

   Even with all of the angelic help along the way, the furious, sometimes frenzied, yet futile surgeries, chemotherapies, radiations, and surgeries from complications of all of that, were going to simply delay the inevitable-  the death of my beloved Lynn.  Glioblastoma has no survivors.  It would kill her.

   The Physicians knew it......and way down deep, we did too.

   Twenty months have come and gone.  The physicians are all gone.  The ferocious pace of my caretaking life for her has come and gone- a hard life, but I'd take it back in a snap. The cards, the calls, the greeters, the meal preparers, the house cleaners, the well wishers, bless their hearts, are all quiet now-  the house is deathly quiet.  The only phone calls- drug store.........card service calls.  An occasional stray card comes with words like "your loss is heaven's gain", "you're in our thoughts and hearts".........well meant, but another level of love.  I don't want to hear about heaven's gain- (even though I know it to be true) I want her back.......or I want to go with her.

   THIS IS THE HARD PART; the roaring quiet......the halt.  The "you're not Dave and Lynn any more, your single Dave who saddens hearts whenever he comes into anyone's presence who might have known us before."  Where can I go to get away from it all.  My friend said that he finally had to leave town.  Problem is, anywhere I go, I'm have me along, and I'm the problem now through no fault of anyone.  I even make one of my favorite restaurant managers cry when I come in.

   Thank God for my faithful piano students whom I dearly love.  They are a gift, and I get to see them every week.  They come to learn piano, even though they know that Lynn is no longer here.  Some speak of it, others, don't........we just do piano together- I love that.

    Seems that practice doesn't make perfect, it makes permanent.  What you don't practice, or practice badly, becomes permanently that way.  On the other hand, what you practice well,  becomes more permanently so.

    As it is with piano, it is with marriage.  Lynn and I practiced it hard.  Sometimes I think she totally out-practiced me- she was so completely dedicated to me, yet she was her own person. Our marriage was not perfect, but the practicing of loving made us more and more permanent.........almost 50 years permanent.

    After so many years we became more and more of a picture of two-in-one with intermingled, three dimensional pixels- in color.  Losing a spouse is like taking out intermixed pixels, dimensions, and colors. You get a rather flat, one dimensional, gray picture........not even a stark black and white.  You lose half of a whole picture.  The question is what to do with a flat picture.

     It is the aftermath of lost loved ones.  It is the afterlife of re-discovering the life of many years ago- single, when for so long you have lived this miracle of life that is truly "a mystery";  That two lives can come together as one.

   What a priviledge to leave and cleave, and become as one.  Lynn and I got to have all of that.  It was a wonderful life.  But that life is gone now.  I've been flattened.

   God help me to be only what you made me to be;  nothing more, nothing less.  Help me to find out what that is now.

    Help me to be a good Man, a good Son, a good Dad, and a good Grandpa........somehow- without Gram.