I jealously keep it for myself. No one can, no one will, gather our love with as much right or as much care as I shall. Gathering and binding these scattered seeds of our love, not for display on a shelf as a work well done, but as a wondrous living thing that will continue to grow in startling new ways as the years unfold.
My dearworthy darling,
stay close.
I need your hands
to help me gather
and your breath
to inspire.
Day I: Daytime (1)
Even youths will faint and be weary,
and the young will fall exhausted;
but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.
—Isaiah 40: 30–31 (NRSV)
Linda and I read these words on the morning of that day in late January, 2006, when we met with her oncologist to begin her first clinical trial. It was a regime that brought her life back to nearly normal for several months. We were full of fearful apprehensiveness and uncertainty that Monday morning, but already, even then, Linda’s strength was evident. Her determination to face the reality of her new life directly and with courage could be seen in her eyes. It was a difficult task for her. Yet, for two years her courage, clear-eyed realism, and gentle grace never faltered.
I wish I had her by my side now, helping me through this new trial. I fear I have neither her strength nor her courage. Worse, I don’t have her calming words, her soft and caring touch, and her gentle eyes to sustain me. And sometimes . . . sometimes, the pain is more than I can bear.
Day I: Mid-Morning [Terce]
For love is as strong as death . . .
—Song of Songs 8:6 (NIV)
Linda died just two weeks before our thirty-ninth wedding anniversary. We were married on Memorial Day weekend, 1969. We were just kids, not yet 21 years old. Our story began nearly five years before that, in November of 1964, when Linda asked me out for our first date. Actually, if legend is to be believed, the first sparks of our love may have been struck long before that when we were kindergarten classmates. You see, Linda and I did not fall in love; it did not just happen. Love was prepared for us; it prepared us and nurtured us. In its embrace we matured into adults, and as we matured, the embrace grew stronger, the roots struck deeper. Our love was tested—by shattering disappointments, by long periods of physical separation, by thoughtless and long-regretted wounds—but it proved stronger for the testing, deeper for the challenge. Our rich, shared, and mutually treasured history and the love it nourished has extraordinary tensile strength. Stronger than death.
Day I: Noon [Sext]
Loud as a trumpet
in the vanguard of an army,
I will run ahead and proclaim.
—Rilke
Linda reacted to talk of her courage with a wry smile, not believing a word of it. Friends called it extraordinary courage, but she insisted it was nothing more than facing reality. “It’s not courage. When something like this happens, you just call it what it is, and deal with it.”
The truly courageous may not be the best detectors of courage.
Linda would not be comfortable with elegy. She hated embellishment. “Just tell the story, Jerry,” she would so often say. “Leave out all the extra stuff and get to the point.” She preferred the light of the sun to the glow of sentiment.
I, on the other hand . . .
I want to paint her in brilliant colors “in one broad sweep across heaven.”
Day I: Daytime (2)
Diary entry: Friday, July 11, 2008
I have been feeling especially vulnerable and at sea this week. For most of the day on Monday I experienced abdominal pain, and in the evening I discovered I was bleeding from my gut. Disoriented and alarmed, I drove myself to the emergency room. A series of tests administered through the night showed that nothing was seriously wrong. I was discharged Tuesday, armed with antibiotics to fight the invading infection. The bleeding had shocked me, but what knocked the pins from under me was the realization that for the first time since I was a teenager Linda was not by my side, calmly assessing the situation and focusing on what needed to be done. Like an earthquake victim, I felt that something absolutely solid, a point of reference for everything else in my experience, was no longer there.
Day I: Afternoon [None]
John of Damascus wondered whether any pleasure in life is unmixed with sorrow. Grief asks whether sorrow will ever again permit pleasure into the mix.
Diary entry: August 2, 2008—7:20 a.m.
I sit here in the airport waiting for the departure of my flight to Chicago. Today I begin a ten-day trip via air, train, and automobile to Chicago, Seattle, Vancouver, and back to Chicago. It is the first vacation trip I can remember without Linda. I feel apprehensive and not a little fearful. Can this trip hold any pleasure for me? How could there be pleasure if it cannot be shared with her? Can I bear for ten days the heavy burden of emptiness I carry? At home I could lean on friends if my emotional skies turned dark. And I had my work to distract me. Yet, I don’t want to be distracted. I’m living a paradox: I want to find a way of living without Linda that is not living without her. When at work, I live without her. That’s the last thing I want.
My hope is that this time away from work will give me an opportunity to think about what is ahead for me, about how to live into the future. I am entirely at sea about that future. With Linda gone I scarcely know who I am. I feel like an adolescent again, with one major difference. As an adolescent I didn’t know what to do with my life, with my future, but I never doubted that there was a future for me. The future was there, a vessel to be filled, though I knew not how. Second adolescence comes with no such assurance. I am not sure there is a future for me, or at least I am not sure whether there is one worth filling. Life without Linda is grim, colorless, and painful. Why live with this? Can I find something that moves me again? I do not know adult life without her. I have no adult memory that is not filled with her presence. Life, perhaps, can go on without her; but can my life go on?
[Sung]
Lord help us to gather our strength in difficult times
So that we could go on living
Believing in the meaning of future days.
—Zbigniew Preisner
Day I: Twilight [Vespers]
C. S. Lewis writes:
Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love. . . . It is not a truncation of the process but one of its phases; not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure. We are “taken out
