Five Years in Heaven

It was a little more than a week ago. I was listening to a song on the radio when I suddenly and inexplicably started to cry. Startled, I wiped my tears and went on until the next day when I looked at a calendar and realized the previous day had been the 22nd and five years since I'd heard a beloved one’s voice.

Tomorrow will be the fifth anniversary of his death. By tomorrow I will have had five years of remembering and five years of forgetting, forgetting everything except the sound of his laughter and of his voice, and the way he always seemed to be listening for mine. 

I think of him often. He is my star, my light, my soul. I know that he is both in heaven and somehow nearby, listening to my laughter and my tears, encouraging me to go on living, laughing and loving because as he knows and has taught me so well, love begets love.

My memoir, Dear Elvis, is available at amzn.to/2uPSFtE

Songs On the Radio

You must forgive me for not writing more, but I have been mourning the loss of someone very dear to me.  So close were we that once, when asked about the relationship between us, I flippantly said we were Siamese twins, separated at birth.  Never once did I consider what it would mean to be separated by death. 

At first, I felt so deeply and intensely lost that for days no other thoughts entered my mind.  Two days after his death, I dreamt I was standing inside his house and even though I was aware that he was gone, I felt great peace even in the moments just after awakening.  Then once again I found myself struggling with his death as though it were some kind of ancient dragon I had to fight and defeat before I could begin to feel better again and, even as I struggled with his death, I tried to deny it, unable to form a simple sentence that would contain both his name and the word 'died' in it.

Then, when the memories started coming back I thought of all of the places we had been to together.  For weeks I began to visit those places, driving around compulsively until I realized I was looking, not for more memories, but for him. 
   

Finally one day I heard a song on the radio about a guy who wanted to be taken to a place where it's “Sunny and 75” and I remembered all the hours I had spent with this man in a room where the blinds were always halfway up and how, whenever I was with him, it was always sunny and seventy-five for me.  On another day while listening to the song “I’m Already There,” I felt his presence beside me. But oh, how I longed to return to normal even as I forgot what normal was. 

Then came the day when I misplaced my wallet and locked myself outside my car and, as funny as it sounds, I knew that normal was returning.  And now when I long to return to the place that was always sunny and seventy-five, I remember that he is already here.

My memoir, Dear Elvis, is available at amzn.to/2uPSFtE