IF …

Sorting through my husband’s things a couple days ago, I found these pictures – of all the things he could have kept while weeding stuff when we downsized a year and a half ago, he chose to keep these pictures as prized possessions. They are not in fancy frames, but they encapsulate our entire life together … one could go so far as to say that they are a kind of time capsule ;-)

So I took them out of the ‘safe place’ he had kept them in, and set them up on the fireplace mantle. Looking at them, a thousand memories dart past my misty eyes. 44 years seems so short; we were so young when we started our life together – he was 24, I was 17.

A lifetime ago.

And yet not long enough.

I never got tired of looking at his handsome face: not even when the passage of time ... and the toll of his incurable condition August thru December 2018 had left its mark on it. To my eyes, he never changed from the first time I set eyes on his face – he was 18, I was 10; and I instantly fell hopelessly in love. He didn’t even know I existed until 7 years later.

And I believe he felt the same about me; he always told me I was beautiful … even in those final days at OHSU: and I know I am not. The image that looks back at me from the vanity mirror today tells me otherwise – I look every bit a 62 year old ‘curvy’ grandma ;-) But, in his eyes, I was still the young girl in the picture he fell in love with; and joined his life with. He told me several times a day, every day, for 44 years that he loved me. He cherished me. Because he believed I was beautiful, I believed I was beautiful. I feel blessed to have had his exclusive love.

If, as the song says, “a picture paints a thousand words” and “a face can launch a thousand ships” … there is so much left unsaid and nowhere left to go now.

If I could be anywhere I wished to be right now, I’d be with him beyond the clouds.

But, that is not possible. Yet.

So I’ll content myself with the “If” face on the fireplace mantle.