Illness Epiphanies

It’s April here, little sweetheart, but winter won’t loosen its grip and I’ve been terribly ill for the last several days. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been posting a bit lighter here but I have been writing to you elsewhere as I’ve been making sure to do a little work on the memoir each day. While I’ve been doing that I had occasion to read a few of your early emails to me and in one of them you describe yourself as being “grumpy as a badger”. That’s how I am right now about being sick and the prolonged winter, as well!

But in addition to being rather grumpy and impatient with being sick, little sweetheart, there’s something about it that makes one a bit contemplative. You can’t do much else but rest and force liquids, so you wind up thinking and half-dreaming, as well. I love writing to you, my little sweetheart, because the more I do, the more I think of and remember all the there things I want to tell you, It keeps things present for me, you know? And that’s something else I want to tell you.

When I was a little boy I was very sick for quite a long time one year. I missed almost half the school year with double-pneumonia. Did I ever tell you this? I’m sure I must have. I was quarantined and left alone at home for several months every day. I think in some way it may have shaped me a little. None of it is as dire or life-threatening as all the things you went through, little sweetheart, with your diabetes all through childhood and the surgeries and recovery years later, just a year before we met, but I feel as though I understood in a deeper way when you told me stories of your struggles and the long hours you had to spend in bed not able to do much of anything but just exhausted and trying as hard as you could to get well.

You’re simply the most courageous person I’ve ever known, little sweetheart. My miracle girl. Remember? I haven’t told you that in a while. You are my miracle. It bears repeating. And I think there’s something to this - the way you “found” me, as you like to say. There’s something of solitude inside each of us that called out to one another. That understood and sought one another. And that is a miracle, too, in its own right.

Please keep finding me, my little sweetheart. Please find me in thoughts and dreams and signs and help and guide me. And take me to you the moment heaven will allow. With all my love forever.