From Joan

It has been Bill and Joan since we were  16 years old.  ( I look back at some pictures of us and I laugh at our cute little baby faces back then. )  With just a few brief times of one or the other of us thinking we should date someone else when we were young and dumb, it has been Bill and Joan for over 50 years.  I have often said that I am not sure that there can be a Joan without Bill, yet I know there has to be. 

Yesterday morning without even thinking about it, I opened the closet and took out his blue jacket.  Just like I have heard that people do, I took the jacket and hugged it and smelled it because that is the only thing left unwashed and still holding his scent.  Even his side of the bed and his pillow no longer give me an awareness of him because they too have been cleaned and changed. The blue jacket will never be............

I know Bill would not want me to mope around, and I really haven’t been doing that. I have instead poured myself into work that could wait, but making this house that he got for me as nice as possible honors him, and hard work heals me. I am thinking about the things that I will do...Bill and I talked about many of the things that he hoped I would do like continuing to go places with my kayak, and other stuff that he knew I enjoyed.  Even when he was so incredibly sick that each day had to be a major effort for him, he thought about me.

 We got a card from Bill’s cousin Grady, and he told us about Bill teaching him the following poem.

“Starkle, starkle little twink, what the heck you are you think?  A flashlight?? “  Grady he said that he has repeated that to his kids and so another part of Bill’s legacy continues.  Bill had hundreds of what we call Bill-isms and this little poem was one of the “repeatable ones.”  It makes no sense, but it is funny and it was Bill.