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Ginger

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How to Say Goodbye

Ginger

How to Say Goodbye

I just received a holiday card and I could not tear my eyes away from the picture. It’s not that it is an exceptional photograph – just a happy candid, nothing professional. The two kids looked beautiful as always, gleeful and rosy-cheeked. Their twinkling-eyed father had his arms spread around them, and his smile was nearly as wide. But this photo was of a family of three … the mother, my friend, died this summer. And I could not imagine how difficult this task of sending out holiday cards must have been for her husband. In fact, I couldn’t believe he took the time to create and send one at all this year. The year that his wife, his love, died unexpectedly.

She had barely passed 40. Blonde, bright, freckled, filled with love and perky to the extreme, it seemed impossible that an exceptionally rare disease could take her life in the span of one season. But as her husband and best friend said, ‘I always thought she was one in million. I was wrong; I guess more like one in 10 million.”

Her funeral was as she would have orchestrated it, although I don’t know that she would have imagined the church so overflowing with friends and family. Her children walked down the aisle with their dad. Well, one walked, the other was carried much like a quarterback protecting the prized ball, although a wriggling one at that. You could hear their father whispering softly, soothingly to them, and some of the rows spilled out small sad chuckles from those who could actually hear the conversation. One whispered question from her son pierced my heart immediately. Pointing to the altar where his mother lay in peace, he asked, “What’s in the big box, Daddy?” His father, a man never at a loss for words, could not reply.

My friend’s husband gave a eulogy that you would never want anyone to have to say, but that we were all so privileged to hear. From our seats in our pews, we wrapped our arms around him, held him, and listened. A man stricken deeply by the much-too-early death of his young wife, but who still felt her love and friendship so alive in his soul, he could smile as he spoke TO her … not about her.

He told us things that those who knew her well nodded along with. But for me, who knew her a long time but did not know much about this wonderful recent life she had created in Charleston, S.C., I learned things I never imagined. It was a glimpse into the happiness she had created for herself and those around her, and it was palpable. Her friends in the church literally credited her for the life they have been living, a life of “love, love, love” – my friend’s mantra.

Her husband spoke of his best friend … his wife … the mother of his children … with such raw emotions. Love, truth, authenticity, loss, passion – but blessedly, no regrets. They had built a life that worked for them in all respects, and they reveled in living it to its fullest. It seemed as if he leaned into his wife as the sun that sent warmth on a cold day … as the stars that lit the darkness … as the anchor to which their family held fast … as the beam that guided them. He laughed. He cried. He fell silent when emotions overtook his words. That spoke the loudest of all.

He spoke directly to their children with an urgent desperateness, trying to impart all that their mother would have wanted them to know about her, all that HE wanted them to know about her… about the way she loved them, about what they would be missing -- as if they had to hear, learn, memorize and remember all of her right then, before they left the church. He told their daughter that she had so much of her mother inside of her, and as he took a breath to steady his voice before continuing, his son piped up in his high-octave voice, “What about me?” Breaking the tension and sadness with a question of pure love and innocence and maybe just a hint of precociousness – a knack that was so much his mother that she could have been speaking through him to render such a moment for all of us.

We left the church looking like we had just been converted: tears streaming down our stunned but grinning faces, simultaneously sobbing and smiling at the stories and sweet moments shared.

Later that afternoon, there was a moment of sheer joy as a southern, sultry-voiced angel sang by her graveside: one of their best friends crooned Amazing Grace with a strength of sorrow and love that somehow made his wheelchair disappear and made us believe he could soar with the seraphs.

And then, it was a party. Completely befitting both my friend and her husband and their family and friends. She would have been the first to kick off her shoes and go running down the dock to jump in the river in her Sunday best and pearls. And that’s exactly what people started to do. Had she whispered in the ears of her girlfriends? Had she nudged the ribs of their husbands? Had she cajoled the sun to bathe everyone in a warmth that demanded quenching? Had the stars begun to appear in a way that reminded everyone of the twinkle in her eyes? The reason, the timing, the impetus is a mystery, but within minutes, dozens of grown adults completely dressed – some still in their shoes and hats – leaped from the dock and splashed into the water at the River House, with laughter and tears and shouts to heaven, calling upon their dear young friend to see them, touch them, join them in spirit.

I believe she already had.