It's Valentines Day, little sweetheart. I sent you and your mom flowers like I do every year. I wrote this morning - I'm at a part in the book where you and I just went to Shakespeare in the Park one warm August night. I went for a run.
A week or so ago, I thought to buy a couple of CDs of DCfC. They were, of course, one of the most important bands to us and we discovered them together. I remember all that music and had it in mp3's on my old laptop. It's been impossible for me to listen to them for years, little sweetheart, because I just start weeping, longing for you. Ben Gibbard wrote the theme song to a new show that's on Apple TV - "Shrinking" - and the first time I heard his voice I started crying. That was just three weeks ago, so I should've known.
Anyway, I put on one of the albums, Plans, tonight. And it sure hasn't changed. I cried and cried and I've barely pulled myself together enough to write this to you, now.
I remember that you had such a sense of your own mortality having grown up with Type 1 diabetes. And that even after your surgeries, just months before we met and fell in love, that you still thought you would pass before me. I remember you telling me once - in your famous blue Prius, en route to Andronico's on a grocery run - that you wanted me to speak at your funeral and to listen to our music and remember you. I started crying when you said that and between sobs. whimpered "but I don't want you to die before me". You reached for my hand and quieted me down until you could pull into the parking lot and hold me.
As for what you asked - I did, of course and incredibly, manage to speak at your memorial but the second thing is still very hard, little sweetheart. And it's tricky - some of the lyrics are almost prescient. That's probably why you loved them.
My heart is full tonight, little sweetheart. Breaking but also grateful. God, how I love you. Forever.
