Thought for the day. . .for a lifetime!

Today was one of those marvelous days when I walked nearly four hours under a crystal-blue sky and couldn't feel the weather. Light breeze maybe. But under the sun, there was no sense of cold or warmth. It felt perfect.

I felt strangely different. . .perhaps more peaceful. But I couldn't identify the feeling exactly. Nothing has really changed in my life. In the midst of my aging I still carry the loss of my beloved wife and the loss of my work I loved so much. Yet, today I felt that while nothing has changed in my life, something may well have changed within me. At last.

I don't know if I can explain why.

Today was one of those light-footed days out on the road. I felt it coming as I stretched gently and ran through an unhurried set of yoga poses. I was out the door in a half hour. As I turned the corner onto Four Mile Road, on my way to skirt the Delta College campus nearly two miles away, I felt light and strong, as if some of my years had suddenly fallen away, leaving me almost weightless.

My limbs felt loose and springy, something like I remember having felt as a boy. I was drawing long, deep breaths that rolled down deep beneath my diaphragm and shoved my lower belly out rhythmically. My strides were slightly longer than usual. I moved along rapidly, feeling the soft strike of my heels, the roll of my weight across the balls of my feet, the firm thrust forward as my strides unfolded.

About a mile and a half out I looked for my woodchuck-buddy Delbert at the entrance to Delta Woods. But presumably, he was off on some private business trip. I thought: Well. . .maybe on the way back.

I took the longer route of the wooded trail, looping north. following the deep drainage ditch to the covered bridge. I paused on the bridge for a few minutes, gazing fondly back north along the ditch. As far as I could follow it with my eye, from where it runs beneath the bridge, rich ground-cover, mature trees, and thick bushes and undergrowth lend the ditch the loveliness of a natural creek.

Light-speckled water sang on round rocks a dozen feet below. Frogs belched their throaty symphony, and gray squirrels scratched about near their nest not ten feet away in low branches of a young beech. Where the massive support beams of the bridge joined close beneath the roof, several barn swallows flitted lightly in and out, their bills full of nesting materials.

I lingered awhile, consciously attuning my senses, searching my mind for a dimly remembered passage from Emerson's "Nature". . .reliving with him his sense -- in much the same sort of bucolic setting -- that he were not himself, but rather a suspended and transparent eyeball. But I was responding with more than just my sight. There was as well the rich scent of damp and promising spring, a veritable chorus of new life unfolding, the rough plank beneath my forearms and elbows, and the taste of warm sweat and cool breeze in my mouth.

All the while my heart swelled and pulsed. I felt buoyant. . .and something else I couldn't immediately define. I turned away and set a rapid pace toward Delta campus.

By the time I broke out of the woods and crossed the meadow to the road, I had identified the feeling.

I was grateful.

I was grateful for the nearly four decades Nancy and I spent together. I was grateful I'd survived my grieving. I was grateful for what it had taught me. I was grateful for my growth gains over the past four difficult years. I was grateful for my growing sense of independence and self-sufficiency. I was grateful that instead of dying I had struggled to grow up at last.

I had this loving thought: despite Nancy's terrible loss of the life she loved and lived so well, I was grateful she was at peace.

But I am still left with this imponderable question: when death comes to end the most important relationship in one's life, then which is worse? To be the one who dies, or the one left in horrible anguish?

I only know that at the time of Nancy's death I would have gladly changed places with her.

So I am still left with this other thought I don't entirely understand or know precisely how to shape into words. But as I ponder the past four years of grieving, I discover that I'm grateful that I was left to carry the anguish and not she.

Still, she had such personal strength and grace. While I can't know for certain, I suspect that had I been the one to die,

Nancy may well have
handled her anguish

far better than have I.