A Lost Love

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I`ve spent the last few hours wondering what to share today. Would it be an old story or poem or even a song I wrote long ago.

Nothing feels right today. Not that there`s anything wrong, not at all.

The morning started great, with acts of kindness were being granted to me and I to others. I got the meals of the day complete along with the dishes that comes with preparation.

Bill`s appointment at wound care went well. He still needs to continue until the wounds close completely. Hopefully within a few more weeks. We`ve had appointments every day this week with one dr. or another.

Today my grandson turns 7 and I`ve face-timed him and wished him well. His parents are taking him to a sit-down restaurant in celebration.

Today is also my anniversary to my second husband. Dennis has been deceased 16 years now. He died on Father’s Day, from an ATV accident. Sadly, his body was found mid-morning. Drugs and alcohol are what really took him, the ATV was the vehicle.

Dennis and I were long divorced by the time he passed. Yet the last year and a half of his life we were friends. I loved him, still do but I was not in love with him when he passed. Those dreams died long before he did.

He had a good heart and could be so loving and kind but there was a side to him I was petrified of. The side of the man who beat me so bad I missed three weeks of work. The alcoholic who I tipped toed around never knowing if I would be hit. I didn`t know about the drugs and type of drugs he was into until late in my pregnancy. He hid that well at first.

I guess I miss what might have been if he could have, would have tried to heal the hurt that drove him to such things. I knew some of what ate at him but not all. At first, I thought I could love him strong enough, deep enough he would open his heart and let me all the way in. But I had two girls who I didn`t want thinking it was ok for a man to put their hands on you. That is not what I wanted to mirror to my girls.

He apologized to me and promised I never had to fear him again. He tried to show me that the last year and a half he was alive. I didn`t completely trust that but will say he did give it an honest go. I think he understood my caution.

My birthday was Father`s Day the year before he died. My birthday is Father`s Day this year again. We all as a family went out to eat to a fancy restaurant and he picked up the tab. He remained sober, not alcohol free, but sober for that day.

We as a family went back to my home and played the WII games console. I have pictures from that day. Who would guess he would pass a year to the very day.

Maybe that is what weighs on me tonight as I type this out. The missed opportunities our family had to be different from what was. The years of torment I saw my daughter subject herself to in her grief of his death.

I talk to him every now again. Sometimes to ask him to watch over our family. Sometimes, especially in the first few years after he passed in anger. Other times in desperation that he somehow fix, the things he broke within us.

The last few years I spoke to him with forgiveness in my heart. A yearning to let him know that I did truly love him.

I saw his spirit a week after he died. I was in the living room and saw his apparition enter the spare room I allowed him to stay in on family nights that last year and a half. I wasn`t scared, in a strange way I was comforted.

The only other time he came to me was in a dream (a visit). I might say I visited him in this place within my dream. Now I know this will sound off to some, but I understood the meaning.

It was like a cave, dark but there were bowls of fire lit and placed every ten to twenty feet within this place. We were both naked, but I was neither hot nor cold. He took my hand, and we lay in his bed. I looked around and the opening of where a window would be or should be I saw the shadows of the tree limbs. I`m unsure what question or the exact words but it wasn`t spoken aloud more telepathically to each other. I think he asked me to stay with him, and I told him that I did not love him that way, that I was in love with somebody else. (we had been divorced well over 20 yrs.) He was not mad nor I afraid. It was truth spoken in the moment. The dream ended.

I went out to his camp, where he lived and stayed, one night with my sister-in-law about a year or so later. I brought out the picture I painted of him and placed it on the mantle and placed his wedding ring in a small box next to it. Maybe as closure for me, I don`t know.

I lay on the couch that night to sleep and peering out the bay window. That is when I felt and knew I had seen the same shadows of the treetops before. Tears streaked down my face as I drifted off to sleep. I never went back to his camp after that night. I had let go and said goodbye.

The following year his camp burnt to the ground, a total loss.

He`s been gone 16 years this Father’s Day, my birthday. I pray his soul found peace and I do hope to see him again in brighter spaces where his light burns brighter, and mine does too.

Happy anniversary Dennis, I still hold love in my heart for you. 💞🫂

✨Be the Light

I guess today`s article wrote itself once I allowed my heart to speak it.