Thank you very, very much for all the support you have given me at this most difficult time. If you left a message here, made mention of my loss on your blog, or said a silent prayer or sent good thoughts my way, I appreciate all of it.
The funeral service was held on Monday. I found this short poem at a place called Backyard Gardener and had it read at the service. It seems appropriate to how I feel right now.
I’ve had the garden tidied up,
As she would have me do.
This little pal who couldn’t stay
To see the season through.
The flowers were her dearest friends,
The garden was her own,
I’ve watched her work, but never knew
The things that she had grown.
Her catalogues keep coming, and
Her garden magazine;
I run across the queerest names,
And study what they mean,
I read them all, from end to end,
And when the spring is here,
I’ll have a garden just like hers,
As though my wife were near.
-Albert H. Pedrick
Appropriately, Lambert also left this comment: “Make sure to spend time in the sun. I started gardening when my Mother died. It helped.”
The last morning Peggy and I spent together we went out to water the Royal Empress trees she had planted alongside the driveway. As we finished, she turned to me, held me close, and with tears in her eyes said “Please don’t let my trees die!” I was quite surprised by this - I figured she’d be around to take care of them for many years - but I replied, “Of course I won’t let them die!”
There is so much to do now, so much more to learn. I cannot let her trees die.
(Crossposted at Pole Hill Sanitarium.)
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Dr. S.,
I’m often struck by the thoughtfulness of your appreciations of musicians and the like.
There is a real love that comes through.
I hope you know that those of us who know you only through electrons can feel that we’re in the presence of a lovely soul.
And this tribute is a wonderful expression of that.
When my father knew he had reached his last weeks, in one especially beautiful New England autumn, he retold an eerie story his mother had told him in his youth. Something about staying alive until the last leaf of autumn fell, and a child who taped the leaves to a tree.
At these times, as you and Lambert have wisely noted, the natural world speaks to us.
A favorite story of mine is James Thurber’s “Memorial,” about the life and passing of man’s best friend. It captures this more touchingly than anything I’ve ever read about man or beast:
I am quite sure that you’ll be a very fine steward for your wife’s plantings.
Best of everything to you!
Dr. S
deepest sympathy, know that you are in our thoughts and prayers.
I knew there was a reason I was listening to this
[x] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
VL is right something shines through the electrons
I can’t match the grace of VL’s words or give you the comfort I’d like to pass from my heart to yours through the magical tubes we call the internet but I can tell you that what has happened has touched me.
Every soul that brings love to this world is worth honoring whether they’re still in the form we knew them or whether they’ve moved on. I will give what honor I can by keeping both you and your wife in my thoughts and prayers.
I don't know you very well
But I lost my father last year, and I’m very sorry for your loss.
The only thing I can add is it helped me to tell his stories, and the story of his passing, to my friends, as many as I could.
Dr. S.
What every one else has said, goes for me.
One feels so inadequate in the face of such a loss. We feel we know you, because of the way that we come to know someone trough their writing, which provides a special kind of intimacy, and yet, we are also strangers.
All losses of those close to us are isolating, but none more so than a loss which seems so unreasonably before its time. Let those close to you be there for you; I know they will want to, because all of us want to as well, we just don’t know how to, except to tell you that you are in our thoughts and our hearts, and please know that whatever you can bear to tell us about this time in your life, we want to hear.