Letter to Randy
26 May 2010 8 Comments
in Uncategorized Tags: anniversary, funny stories, grief
Hi Ran,
I sit here with a heavy heart. My thoughts today have been constantly about you. My emotions change with each memory. Some make me smile, yet others make me weep. Thirty-one years ago today I became your wife. I’ve thought about how we didn’t exactly have a traditional dating relationship. We were each other ‘s best friend before that very first date.. We didn’t need time to get to know each other. We laughed numerous times wondering how we ended up married since neither one of us remember becoming officially engaged after six ‘long’ weeks of dating. It was just something that seemed right. It was certainly not romantic, but right.
They were fun years. Even the rainstorms of life were tolerable because we went through them together. And we went through them with a sense of humor. We both felt that if we couldn’t change our situation we might as well laugh about it. We always did. And we always came out better for it when the rainstorm ended and sunshine brightened our days again. We became stronger for having endured the situation we were given.
You were an absolutely fantastic husband. You were so kind and loving. You taught me how to stay calm when things angered me. That was not easy to learn at first. Sometimes I just wanted a good, old-fashioned argument with you, but it would have had to be one-sided because you didn’t believe in raising your voice or getting angry. You believed in talking things out rationally. When I came around to seeing things your way I knew you were right. So in thirty-one years, I could probably count on one hand the times when we did argue.
You were so funny. I think I miss that the most about you. You could make me laugh about anything. We found ourselves in some pretty funny scenarios over the years. I remember things like going to the funeral home for a visitation and realizing when we got the casket that it was the wrong funeral home. We didn’t quite know how to leave gracefully. We laughed so hard in the parking lot on the way out that both of us were crying. People coming in thought we were crying because we were grieving. Remember the time I was trying to get out of the Dallas airport and we ended up right next to the runway? It was definitely not a place we should have been. You laughed so hard on our honeymoon when the donkey took after me because he thought my camera bag was food. Or when you offered to drive the bus for my second graders’ class trip only to find out when we were ready to leave that you had no idea how to even start the bus. You managed somehow but the city had a few less signs standing that day.
You tried your best to be romantic. Sometimes you succeeded. I remember you picking me up from school some afternoons with a picnic lunch. We would go the park, sit on a blanket, eat a late lunch, and talk about our day. You would serve breakfast in bed many Sunday mornings, or call me on the phone asking me for a date. Sometimes you meant well but it just didn’t work out as planned. I remember the Mother’s Day picnic, our vacation spot to Arkansas, or the cards you bought me for special occasions . The cards were beautiful but the messages you wrote in them were misspelled so badly that sometimes it changed the meaning behind it. It would make me laugh and you would smile and say,Why are you laughing? I didn’t write anything funny. I was being romantic.” When I would read it the way you wrote it we would just crack up.
I could go on and on about your hysterical ‘episodes’. But it would take a book to cover them more than a blog post. Honestly, I have already started putting information together and am going to write a book about your most memorable adventures. I want your grandchildren and beyond to know all about you.
Tonight we would have gone out to dinner and celebrated. You would have sent me sweet emails at work (and I would have laughed at all the misspellings). But I would have thought,’ What a dear, sweet man I married!” This year is quite different. Instead, I went to the cemetery and put a red rose on your grave. Instead of laughing at your emails, I shed tears in seeing your headstone inscription. But the same thought enters my mind. “What a dear, sweet man I married!”
Happy Anniversary, Ran. I love you with every breath of my being.
Peg
