Bill

Twenty years ago today my husband Bill died. I won't write a lot here, because once I start I could go on forever about him.

I just want to acknowledge him today, and to say that I still miss him, sometimes viscerally. I miss the person he was, and the person I was with him, and the person our marriage was. Every day I had with him was the happiest day of my life. I was never so completely myself--my best self--as with him. The only way I can describe the deep contentment I experienced with him was that I felt he knew me the way we think God knows us--all our concupiscence and faults and sins, and all our potential and goodness and virtue. It's freeing beyond description to be known and loved that way. How lucky I was. He made me more gentle and kind, and he would say I made him more socially conscious and responsible, since I was always dragging him out to picket and protest and leaflet against war and nukes and the mistreatment of the poor and disaffected.

When my wonderful friends of more than forty years--Beat, Ellen, Kathy, Sandy, Sharon, and Sue--got together last fall, we talked briefly about him, and my thought that the concept of eternity means that although I am trapped in time, and experience his absence in time, he is in eternity, and therefore doesn't feel the loss: I am always present to him. At Christmas, my sister Margaret gave me an Andrea Bocelli CD, and we cried as she shared a wonderful song she said made her think of Bill and me: "the moment won't last..." but "like stars across the sky, we were meant to shine..."

Bill, of course, had already had this thought about time and eternity. Here is one of his poems, written October 28, 1984:

I think God put us in time
so that He'd always have something
for which to forgive us.

Only in time could a lost opportunity,
a lost friendship, a lost watch,
evoke the same sadness
so long since the loss.

So persistent is time's hegemony
that to break free makes us believe
we could be saints.

And in that, we are.

I kiss you today, Bill, across time and into eternity.