Sunday, December 11, 2011

A Letter to Danny - December 11, 2011

Hello Darling:

One more day has gone.  One more day of missing you so much that I find myself breathless from the hurt.  I wish I had kept a journal all of our years together.  I know honey.  I've kept one for the past twenty years, but I missed the first twenty-seven.  So much time forgotten.  So many regrets for not remembering.  I saw a young couple at the store today.  They had an infant in a carrier and I wanted so badly to say to them "Remember today.  Remember this moment.  Don't let it fade into a mist of times considered so insignificant they aren't remembered.  Not a moment is insignificant, we just allow them to be forgotten."  And so I try to capture moments of our life together....simple moments.

I can almost smell the scent of the paint you used to paint your equipment.  I can see it yellow around where your face mask ended.  I can smell the diesal and oil and gas of your shop and I can picture you repairing your trucks or machines.  I can see you on your tractor out in the fields baling hay.  I can hear the chugging of the baler as it spits one bale out and then another.  I feel myself keeping my balance as I sat on the side of your tractor as we go out to change the irrigation dams.  My one had holds on the the tractor while my other holds on to you.  I've held on to you so many times honey.  I've held on to you in so many ways.  When bad dreams invaded my sleep, I would roll over and put my arm across you.  Your warmth and the steady rhythm of your breathing would lull me back to sleep.  I never dreamed you would not be there for me.  I never dreamed  I would instead reach out and pull your jacket close to me in your place; pulling it tight trying to capture you once more.

I was talking to your sister Sandi the other day.  She had written a letter she wanted to read at your service but couldn't bring herself to stand.  In it were memories she had of you.

She said when she was a girl, she was asked to the prom and didn't have a dress to wear.  She asked your dad if she could get a new dress and he told her "no" that she had one that would do.  It was you who bought her a new prom dress.  She said it was you who walked her down the isle when she was married.  She said it was you who told your siblings to dress appropriately when they went to school.  She told me it was you who put your fist through the door separating the front room from the kitchen because she was going out with a boy you didn't feel she should go with.  She told me she ended up not going with that boy.  She said she looked up to you....that you were her knight in shining armor.

I remember being told about a time when you were down at your Provo shop.  You had told one of your employees to carry a bundled wall tent up the stairs that lead over your office.  The kid told you he couldn't, that it was too heavy.  So you picked the wall tent up in one arm and then picked him up in the other and carried them both up the stairs.  "I can't" wasn't a phrase you accepted from others or from yourself.  Even during the last two years of your life when your health issues might have caused another to quit, you did not.  You were not a quitter.  And so my darling, in my writing those five words "You were not a quitter" I realize that you would expect me to not be a quitter either.  I will not quit my darling.  I will keep going no matter how hard the path.  I will live the rest of my life as I have lived the past forty-seven.  I will live them loving you, praying for you, being thankful for you and working to make you proud of me. 

Wherever you are my love, whatever you are doing I am loving you Far Beyond the 12th of Never.

1 comment:

  1. I think "Far Beyond the 12th of Never" sounds like a great title for a book. :)

    ReplyDelete