Blessed Days

RETURNING TO LIFE AFTER BEING DEAD – When I am feeling dreary, annoyed, and generally unimpressed by life, I imagine what it would be like to come back to this world for just a day after having been dead. I imagine how sentimental I would feel about the very things I once found stupid, hateful, or mundane. Oh, there’s a light switch! I haven’t seen a light switch in so long! I didn’t realize how much I missed light switches! Oh! Oh! And look – the stairs up to our front porch are still completely cracked! Hello cracks! Let me get a good look at you. And there’s my neighbor, standing there, fantastically alive, just the same, still punctuating her sentences with you know what I’m saying? Why did that bother me? It’s so…endearing.-Amy Krauss Rosenthal

One day I found a banana smashed on the floor.  Annoyed for days, I related this disappointment to a friend who reminded me that someday my house will be empty and quite tidy with all the banana wielding children of mine adults. I never considered that my home would really be empty.  Jerry and I anticipated an empty nest with just the two of us.  Sadly, it will never happen.

I have read that survivors hold their loved one in a state of perfection.  It is true, I am hard pressed to think of things that annoyed me about him, yet I bet my kids would say I was plenty annoyed. After taxing my memory, the few things I can think of are now trivial: throughout the week dirty socks littered the bedroom floor and remained in balls until I put them in the laundry basket and he never seemed to change the cat box as much as I did. After almost six months without him, the petty annoyances have filtered out of my brain like a dream catcher releases nightmares.    On this dreary, cold rainy morning in Maine, when I am feeling just a bit sad, I remain sentimental about my life with Jerry.  I treasure every day I spent with him-the good days, the bad days and the days that were quite ordinary and mundane.  They all take on a renewed energy infused with love and sentimentality. I realize just how blessed I was.