It still hurts so much

I’ve been sitting around all night trying to ignore my feelings. It’s not working.

First of all I HAVE to stop reading the local news. It’s all filled with sad, horrible events. More DUI deaths. Why didn’t I ever notice how many there were before? Do we naturally block out that which doesn’t directly affects our lives? Are we so sheltered that we don’t see what’s going on around us? Then there are the other incidents, shootings, stabbings, beatings, just outright meanness in general. What’s the world coming to? I know there’s goodness out there but they sure don’t put it in the news much.

Second, I HAVE to figure out what to next weekend. The closer it gets the more it hurts. It’s going to be that day all over again. I have good ideas of what to do but I just can’t get myself into the mood to make any plans or decisions. I’m not sure if either of us realized it was Father’s Day on Sunday. That would have been the first Father’s Day she has ever missed. But then, she might not have. We’ll never know.

We rearranged Mary’s room downstairs for Julie. Went through her closet and through all the boxes she had packed up from high school and college. Found pictures I hadn’t seen before. She was smiling in every single one of them. That girl never took a bad picture.

There was one of her laying on the hood of her car the day we bought it. It was beautiful, all clean and shinny and un-dented. She was almost 17 when we bought it on December 31st 1997. Oh, how she loved that car. Her last year of college the air conditioner died. We never fixed it. She said she didn’t need it because she didn’t drive around in the middle of the day. And when she drove to and from work she’d roll down the windows and let the fresh mountain air flow through. It was always cool in the mornings and evenings anyway. Every dent on her car had a meaning, a memory for her. I asked her several times these past few years when she was going to get a newer car. She was always having something fixed on it, mostly minor annoyances. Mary said “Never! I’m keeping it till the day I die”. She said that about a lot of things. I think it shows the passion she had for life. Mary was your friend “till the day she’d die”. Everything she said came true. Just a little to soon.

But now we know her passion and love will go on long after “the day I die”. It always sounded like such a long way off. Never thought it would be around the next bend in the road. Never thought it would be today.

Mary’s room is still Mary’s room. Only the bed has been moved. Her tea cups are still on the wall. Her book shelves still hold her movies and books she was saving. Her desk, dresser, stereo, cupboard are all still in place. Julie says it makes her feel like Mary’s in the room.

I watch TV to drown out the pain, I go to work to push her face out of my mind, I try to keep busy to keep from thinking about the reality of life without Mary but nothing helps. She’s always there tugging at my heart strings.