SIMPLE REMINDERS

 

Note Pad, Jamestown NC

A marriage is a partnership between two soulmates as they both navigate their way through a shared lifetime.  For some like my neighbors that journey can last eighty years or half that time for my wife Karen and me.  She departed this mortal life sixteen years ago.

It should be no secret to anybody that making a lifetime partnership work takes commitment and work.  It doesn’t simply glide along without any bumps along the road.  And there are times of stress and tribulations where the little things can become irritable.  And it’s so easy to look back on those things with incredulous wonder as to how they were even considered a bother.

Karen and I spent many hours shopping in malls and quaint little gift shops browsing for something in particular and nothing in particular.  On many such occasions, Karen would spot a set of note pads that were the personification of the Holy Grail.  And I would spot her purchasing them before I could sound the alarm reminding her that we already had cornered the market on note pads and amassed a lifetime’s supply!  Those small purchases really didn’t amount to as much of a fuss that triggered a response from me.  After all, she wasn’t sitting at home and acquiring large blocks of Enron stock. 

A few years ago, I rounded up all the unused note pads scattered in drawers and shelves around the house and consolidated them in my office.  And every day since then I have been drawing from the cache and using them for grocery lists, note taking, weekly golf pairing lists, passwords, increasing reminders, etc.  And every time I use one of the “lifetime note pads” it reminds me of her.  So, it seems my misplaced objections were actually priceless, simple reminders of her for the future.

"Grief is a giant neon sign, protruding through everything, pointing everywhere, broadcasting loudly, 'Love was here.'

In the finer print, quietly, 'Love still is'."

 ~Heidi Priebe