The Death Train

I recently read about the Death Train, you know, the one where the grief stricken stand on the platform waiting and listening to the roar and clanging of the train that will no doubt run them over on the death date anniversary of the one they have loved and lost.  

For me it is a series of hours and days and weeks where you feel a clenched fist gripping the throat of your soul.  My eyes are closed because to see what is coming is just too much, to know that it will come for me is just too much...there is no more room within these eyes for even one more image of doom.  I do not want to stand and wait for this train, I do not want to get on it and ride around year after year after year recalling the worst day of my life.

Instead I want to stretch my head up high, eyes wide shut, and spend every day, painful as it is remembering the love of my life.  

I want to honor every day we ever had together.

I want only images of the boy I loved as a child and the man I married when I was all grown up.

I want to always see my David walking down the hall towards me at KP High to pick me up from school, in his skin tight wranglers, his wife beater and his tan work boots unlaced and that look of pure love on his face.

I want the picture of seventeen year old David teaching fifteen year old me to body surf up at Hampton Beach and how horribly I failed but how huge he laughed.

I want all the images from our youth, our childhood memories to step forward.  I want EVERYTHING from our life together as grown ups to stand front and center.  

I want to NEVER forget the moment we met again after 27 years in a tiny airport in Little Rock. Or when I opened my eyes the next day and saw him laying there looking at me.  If love had a look it was what I saw in those eyes in that moment.  

It is these things that I need to stand and wait for, to carry me forward year after year after year after year.  It is this boat I need to ride on for the rest of my days.  I do not want to be on that platform waiting to be run over by a train of death that will bring me nothing but devastation for the rest of my life.  I do not want to be one of those people who wait for the anniversary of death. It is not my friend, it is not kind, it is not my David, nor is it my friend Evelyn.  They are not on that train, only pain is.  They are somewhere out there watching over all of us and they need to be remembered and celebrated for who they were every day to all of us...not for how they left us on that one horrible day.  

I know, because it is easy to know this, what I want will not be easy.  The pain I hold is very real and very raw.  The wound is deep.  I will need strength that I do not feel to bring me past this, to make me look the other way.  I will need sunshine and wine and the love of my friends.  I will need only to close my eyes and see the face of my love, and the face of our girl to bring me back  from the brink.

I will do this.  I will overcome the death date.  I will overcome the bad.  I will not allow one bully to wipe away all that was good.  I will do this...but not this time.  This time I will stand where I stood on that day and I will see what I will see.  Head stretched high and eyes wide shut.