Tomorrow is January 4, 2018 and it marks 26 years since I married Dan. We were both 20 years old. Yes, 20 short years old. I feel the need to pause here and apologize to our parents for the stress we must have caused announcing that in all of our utter adultness, we would be getting married. Oh my. Just babies. So, I'm sorry, Parents, and thank you for going along with it.
Marriage is not for wimps. Under the most excellent of conditions, marriage is H.A.R.D. It's also wonderful and sacred and a gift like no other, but it's stinkin' hard. I doubt I'm bursting anyone's bubble here. Most everybody knows marriage is difficult. But when I weigh all of the struggles against all of the blessings, the blessings win every time. And that's not necessarily based on quantity. I'd say that in the 20 years of marriage that Dan and I got to experience, the number of challenges was greater than the number of blessings...for you math types: CHALLENGES>BLESSINGS...but I'm telling you that the QUALITY of blessings we experienced from being married to each other can hardly be described and those blessings are certainly not tainted by time or even death while the sting of the struggles is harder to remember and definitely not what I hang on to. I've had plenty of time to reflect on our story together and I would like to go ahead and declare that, in my opinion, and perhaps the opinion of my friends and family, Dan had a way more difficult task being married to me than I did being married to him (and if Dan could vote, he would probably not agree with me because he was just the nicest guy EVER...more about that in a bit). He wasn't perfect. Nobody is. But the longer I am able to sift through those memories and mental pictures in my head of the husband Dan was, the more I realize how blessed I was to have him and how blessed I am to have the memory of him. Of us.
On this, our anniversary, I feel sad that I can't see him, talk to him, hug him. But I don't want to just be sad. I also want to pour over snapshots, physical and mental, of him and of us. I want to remember all the ways he was such a good man, good father and a devoted, sweet husband. When we were dating, he ASKED me if he could call me his girlfriend. It was adorable. He was so humble and never presumptuous. He wrote love letters. He proposed on the dock of a lake and although I think the first thing I said was "Aren't you supposed to be on one knee?" he opened the box and gave me the ring and married me anyway. He spent the first couple of years of our marriage working hard to put me through graduate school when we were dirt poor and although I was a 5'4" bundle of stress for those 2 years, he never seemed to resent it and even yelled out "4 point 0!" and "That's my wife!" when I walked the stage when I probably deserved a "She's super grouchy when she's stressed out!" or "Thank God that's over!" He surprised me on the Fall break of my first semester of working in a school in Plano with a getaway to San Francisco. On days he was able to work from home, he would show up at my work with lunch or flowers or a drink from Sonic. He shared my joy in finding out we were expecting our first child (and the next 3) and took such good care of me. He was an excellent father and even when the kids outnumbered us 4 to 2, he was so consistent in temperament. It was very admirable and almost mysterious to me, as someone who was more prone to horrible-ize things and freak out and get snippy when under pressure. He taught me, by example, how to tone it down and still kept cool when I chose not to tone it down. He wouldn't fight with me. The nerve. There were times I really wanted to argue and he just wouldn't do it. I have no idea how he could do that because I could be really obnoxious, but he just wanted to love me. He wanted to talk things out and think things through and the balance between him and me was a perfect design. He knew when to shield me from life. Especially when parenting some precious but autistic boys got to be too much, he always found a way to give me a refuge so I could calm down and gain perspective and get back to being Mom, but with a second wind and the knowledge that I was never doing it alone. He worked hard so I could be at home with my kids, even after all the time we had both spent getting me through graduate school. He bought me chocolate (and various types of candy...I may have a bit of a sweet tooth) for no reason except that he knew I loved it. He would come home with an outfit he had bought for me just because he had some extra time in the day and I would rarely go shopping for myself. He planned family outings and vacations and bought a nice camera (before people were practically born with a camera phone) and took SO MANY PICTURES. What foresight and what a gift those pictures are now. He compiled them into slide shows burned onto CDs, accompanied by sweet songs that still take me back to those times when I hear them.
He was so brave. I feared lots of stuff through our 20 years from not having enough money to pay the bills to our kids' future to dealing with autism to how to survive cancer. He had to be scared, too, but it never really showed. He was my rock and he knew it and he took it very seriously. Even when he became so sick that there were few options left, he was the one who made the tough decisions, like going on hospice because he didn't want to endure another procedure and I think he didn't want to put me through the stress of that although I would have done anything for him and supported any decision he made. He spent those last several weeks with a laser focus on getting his affairs in order. Where I felt foggy and exhausted, he seemed to have a clarity and determination that made me wonder who was the stronger one here, the wife sticking by her man's side, into the valley of the shadow of death, or the dying man, still leading the way and taking care of his wife until his last breath and beyond, somehow. My birthday was less than a month before he died and he rarely got out of bed and never left the house anymore but he made sure that someone went out on his behalf and bought a big, soft, bathrobe for me that was just like the fancy hotel ones because just weeks before, we had celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary on a surprise trip to California and stayed in a beautiful hotel with, you guessed it, fancy robes. I ooohed and ahhhhed about how nice they were (I'm a fairly simple girl) and he must have decided right then that he would get one for me. That trip was so hard for him because he did not feel well at all, and so bittersweet for us because we knew it would be our last, but he did the best he could and he treated me like a queen and it is one of my most treasured memories.
I was so loved. No doubt about it. It's permanently etched on my heart and it's the place I sometimes go when life makes me feel like maybe I'm not all that loved or loveable. I was and I am and I can be steady and strong like Dan was. And for the record, he was that way because of his devotion to following Christ's example. Mystery solved. He's not here to celebrate #26 and, yes it makes me sad and kinda mad, but it's ok. Seriously, it is. Because it was a beautiful love story and I had a leading role and, just WOW that I got to experience it. My story isn't over even if that part of it is, but having been married to that wonderful man will always be one of the very best parts of the story. Happy Anniversary, Dan. I love you.
