Tears, Memories, and Perfect Words

 

Working on Jaelyn’s birthday party planning tonight brought mixed emotions.  This is her second birthday without her daddy.  The special days are the days when I wonder if the pain at these times will ever lessen.  I find myself sitting and crying over our loss which I haven’t done in a while.   Don’t get me wrong though – no tears does not equal no pain.  The grief is a constant dull throb, with moments of sharp stabbing pain.   Thankfully the moments of sharp stabbing grief are not as frequent as they were a year ago.  There is not a day that goes by that we don’t think about Scott and talk about Scott – often with laughter, sometimes with tears, and occasionally with laughter and tears combined.  Scott left us with many happy, funny, and special memories.

Every time we take a trip to the cabin with my parents, we talk about Scott and memories that we experienced with him at the cabin.  When we were riding the bike trail yesterday and finding porcupine after porcupine, I kept thinking about a time a number of years ago on the bike trail with Scott and my parents.  I’m not sure if it was before Jaelyn was born, but if she was born, it was when she was really little.  It was a hot summer day and we had Shadow along with us.  She was running on ahead of us, just on the edge of the bike trail.  Shadow ran right through the coils of a rattle snake without seeing the snake.  Scott got off his bike quickly and pulled out our pocket camcorder.  He was videotaping the snake while my parents and I talked.  We didn’t realize that he wasn’t listening to our conversation until he moved to get closer to the snake he was videotaping and realized that there was a second rattle snake, closer to him than the first one.  Scott was quite upset that we hadn’t told him about the second snake – even though that was the entire topic of our conversation while he was taping the first snake.  I think that the video of that episode was lost over the years, but every time I think about it, I still want to laugh until I cry, just like everyone but Scott did at the time.

I sat down at the computer tonight after putting Jaelyn to bed, feeling down and missing Scott.  I pulled up Facebook, to find that within seconds of pulling it up a friend posted a poem on my page.  The timing of it was perfect and was a great comfort – thanks Matt!