Three weeks ago today, I drove you to the hospital. We waited for three hours in the waiting room and complained about how ridiculous it was that they told us to be there at 8:30 when they weren’t taking you back until 11:30. Oh, how I would love to have those three hours back again.

How has it been three weeks? It seems like you’ve been gone forever but, at literally the same time, it feels like I was holding your hand yesterday, alive and well, the only worry on your mind: getting this surgery out of the way so that you could go home with me and then get back to work soon. Back to feeling like yourself. Back to “normal.”

It should have been soon…if we’d have had the surgery on the original date, April 19th, things would have been so different. You’d be getting to take the neck brace off tomorrow and you would have been so excited to be free of it. The original surgery date was six weeks ago.

Instead, you were free of it much earlier but in a way none of us ever even imagined, never wanted…couldn’t stop. And now I look over at your side of the bed every night and say I love you and I miss you so much, to a blank space.

You’ve always filled in my blank spaces before. I didn’t want to ever get married again; you filled in a blank space I was trying to delete. I felt alone and worthless, ruined and a failure; you reminded me who I am and what I was worth, to you, to the kids, to God, and to the world. I didn’t know what my purpose was after kids graduating and retiring from nursing; you made me excited for all of the things that would now live in that blank space. There were no blank spaces when you were here. No matter what the challenge, the worry, the task at hand, you always said “We’ve got this, baby. Together, we’ve got this.” And then I always believed you. Simply because we were together. So…what happens now that “we” became a “me”?

All in all, the highs were worth the pain. You were worth it. We were worth it. I don’t know how “I’ve got this” without you but I do know that we always believed and knew that God was part of that we. It was never just us because, although it is obvious now how a strand of three cords can be frayed, it cannot be broken. And we cannot be broken because I’ll see you one day in Paradise.

I just didn’t think that would be the very next time I’d see you, three weeks ago today.