Letter: There’s Joy in the Journey Too

It would have been her 76^th birthday so though I had lost her to cancer after a half-century of marriage, once again I found myself in the mountains.

There by one of our favorite rivers, a simple hike where so long, long ago we had gone hand-in-hand, I unpacked both her and my favorite beverage, and on my third, and last, match I was able – before the breeze blew it out yet again – to light the single candle on the homemade cookie.

I wished her a happy heavenly birthday, told her how much I missed her, shared with her where I was, and wondered what she could see where she was.

I didn’t hear her respond. Perhaps the sound of the river riotously rolling through the rocks covered the sound of her voice and what she might have whispered.

A chipmunk joined me for lunch and we chatted for a while. It didn’t have much to say either but it seemed to enjoy sharing a small piece of her birthday cookie with me.

It was on this very day, July 30, six years ago, just eight days following our 46^th Anniversary, that we had sat, close together, my wife and I, in the oncologist’s office and I was trying to decipher the medical report I had just been handed.

I did hear my wife’s voice then.

“What does it say?” she whispered.

“It says ‘you are unremarkable,’” I whispered back.

The doctor turned from the computer monitor and laughed.

“That’s a good thing! You want to be unremarkable. You have enough ‘remarkable’ suspicious indicators so to be ‘unremarkable’ is good.” 

But the unremarkableness would end. 

We did reach our 50^th Wedding Anniversary and what a so-special celebration it was. 

And though now I meander about mountain meadows without her hand in my own, still there is joy. 

The kind of deep-seated in my heart joy, the tear-stained pages of my journal joy, of having had for so long a wife so remarkable.