Letter: Where and When?

This morning I typed in my search box of articles I had written “perfect storm” thinking I would find something else.

But this was the picture that appeared.

Two years ago, this coming April 3, Bill’s Boathouse, our place of business, burned to the ground.

Our family wrote: ‘We are absolutely heartbroken. We had grand plans of reopening within the month. So much work had been done only in one horrific inferno for it all to be taken away. So many family treasures were completely lost.’

Upon arriving on the scene at shortly after 2 a.m., I was approached by the firefighter in charge who said, “David there is no easy way to say this. It’s gone. It’s all gone.”

Dazed, finding what I had just witnessed incomprehensible, I returned home where my wife was sleeping and I sat down next to her.

“What’s wrong?”

For what seemed an eternity, I could not speak. I did not know how to say that there was nothing left of a place where we’d raised our family to love the water, the wind, the waves.

The sunsets.

The firesides.

We sat there together then in the early morning darkness, held one another, and cried.

And now she is gone.

Almost exactly one year later our family gathered again, this time for a loss greater far.

So, my question this morning is this.

Where do we learn, and when do we learn, how great a love we had?

The answer: Now. It’s always now. The before, during and after, now. The present.

The sunsets.

The firesides.

Now.

And when the waves of trouble, grief and pain assume mega seismic proportions.

And when our heart is overwhelmed with tragedy, devastation, and loss.

And when all you once had is taken away, and the arduous, hopeless task of searching through the rubble for any treasures that might have survived ends inevitably with the realization that no, there is nothing that remains.

And when the cards of condolences are finally, tearfully, removed from the wall, pictures put in scrapbooks or boxes, closets and drawers cleared of what she once wore.

That’s when.

That’s when you realize how precious, how adored, how cherished, how treasured is what and who matters most.

In the moment.

In the pain.

Now.