One More First--Done and Over!

Well, our 23rd wedding anniversary passed by last Sunday. Rather uneventfully. There were no longstem yellow roses, no dinner at Grey Moss Inn with Moet Chandon White Star champagne (yes, the whole bottle just for me! LOL). No mushy or funny cards....and most of all, no Larry. Instead it was dinner at Karen's with Leslie & Kyle & the kids. And nobody even mentioned that it would have been our 23rd anniversary. Guess they didn't want to "upset" me, or else they just forgot. An easy thing to forget...somebody else's anniversary.

There were yellow roses, but this time I did the giving...and they were silk bunches poked into the styrofoam in the little brass vase stuck in the little brass ring on his crypt--poked way down to try to keep the wind from blowing them away.

I go out to that cemetery and climb up on my step stool (yes, he's still 'so tall' that I need a step stool...he can't very well bend down to me anymore! [crypt is so high I can't touch it if I stand on the ground]); anyway, I get on my step stool and I reach up and touch that cold, cold granite, and my hand slides over the letters of his name--and it still doesn't seem real. I know it is, but it's all surreal. Like I'm in a dream (or nightmare, as the case may be.); or maybe a fog and it will lift any minute.

We're all there, Charlotte (his Mother), and Karen (who loved him nearly as much as I did) and me. The women in his life...I look at their faces and I see the sadness, but it still doesn't seem real. How can my wonderful 'widdle' husband (aka WWH) possibly have gone without me? It just can't be true, it just can't! If he'd just told me he was going, I'd have gone too. But he didn't so now here I am--all by myself, even in a crowd.

Alas, it is all too true. So, I put the flower vase back in it's little ring and climb down. I stand there at the base of the crypts and have a cigarette for him and then we go home...everybody but him. I wonder who will do this for him when I can't get up on a step stool anymore?

So much for wedding anniversaries...