When You Were Dead

My dearest husband,

I loved you more when you were dead.  Maybe that is true of everyone who passes--or maybe it is true only for those with whom we spend the most intimate moments of our lives.  When you were alive--I had expectations.  Expectations of you, and us, and what we could and would build together.  What I didn't know is that expectations are built on fantasy air--they cannot endure, they cannot withstand the  batterings of a real life.  I am so sorry--I did not know that then.

I did not appreciate enough--who you were with me, with our children, with our family, and friends, with your fellow soldiers.  I only saw that you could be more---that you should be more--and I was blinded to so many moments that could have lifted you and me and us up and away from the pettiness of daily life.  Now I mine your letters and emails, my memory and memories of your family for all the little treasures that I failed to see at the time.  And I am inconsolable. I have loved you so poorly. You deserved more.  Now, too late, I cannot give it.

Now when I tuck our children into bed and kiss them lightly on the cheeks, I tell them that mommy loves them and daddy loves them--and a tear travels from my eye to their cheeks and merges there with their bewildered tears.  How do I teach them to love and cherish in the moment? So they do not miss, in the flurry of daily detail, the treasures we have in each other?  How do I give them a picture of their father--that is more than the treasured memories I've extracted from emails and pictures--and so few home movies.  How?

There are days that I envy you your deadness.  In death, I think, there is no capacity for pain and loss--there is only the possibility of something new and fresh.  I don't understand death--I thought I did--but I don't.  Do you see me now? Do you see the children?  I want to believe you do.  I want to believe that because we are attached at the heart you will always be here watching us, guiding us as best you can from your seat behind the veil.  I want to believe this because it comforts me--it helps me to get up each morning and go on.

Yet a part of me know that death might just be the end.  The end of body, the end of spirit.  The end.  That you cannot watch me or the children because you are gone--your spirit if such a thing really exists -- is esoteric and floating like gas to merge with other gases to form something new.  It has no memory--it has not heart with tendrils reaching out to others.  It is free --from care from worry.  And after all that you've been through--all the horror that you've seen--all the times you heart has ached from missing us--don't you deserve that?  You do.  Oh my love, you most certainly do.

It is I who cannot or will not let you go.  It is I who must stand each morning in my grief and light a path to hope and promise to our bewildered children, as I pour the milk into the cereal bowls and pack their lunches for school.

The mourners have gone.  Our families have gone back to their own lives.  The Army has set us free--that's what they've said.  We're on our own now--in a raging sea of chaos and possibilities and I am left to steer this ship--and I don't have the foggiest notion how.  But somehow, I will figure it out.  I will do this because I am a better person for having loved you.  I will do this because to do less would dishonor the part of you that lives on in these beautiful children.

I am sorry--that I did not love you better. Sorry for the pettiness that caused us to often to quarrel.  I am sorry that it took your death--to show me what mattered and that this knowledge, this new appreciation of you and love and life came too late for us.  If there is a part of you that still can reach into the living world--know this--I loved you as best I could and with a heart that was still unfolding.  Part of you walks in your children's bones and I will you see every day in them.

I loved you more when you were dead.

Your loving wife,