Maybe I just couldn't love you enough....

My darling Nathan,



I remember the day we decided to take our 26 year friendship to another level. You had been through a string of bad decisions, broken hearts, and disappointments.  I had too and yet you were everything I wasn't, and I think that's what attracted me to you. There were a thousand things about you that drove me crazy, but just as usual; I picked the ones who were the absolute worst for me.

Although it was what I had always wanted, I didn't think we'd work as more than friends back then, but it quickly evolved into exactly that…something that worked. What we considered "dating" was really just two people learning about each other. Late night phone calls where we'd talk about anything and everything, late evening sitting in your truck, we'd share a bad cup of coffee from a gas station, getting completely swallowed up in conversation. I knew I was in love with you about a week later. I had never been so sure of anything in my life. We got married exactly a month later.  We talked about the future, growing old together, about how we wanted a daughter, and about how if we simply couldn’t fathom how either of us would ever survive without the other.  I was in love with you. Almost everything about you.

Things weren’t perfect.  Nothing ever is, of course, and anything worth having takes work.  We had a difficult season.  It was so hard, but we fought through it.  We fought and clawed our way to the other side and came out standing.  And not just standing, but standing beside each other, hand in hand.  We had a daughter, to complete our family.  Sawyer adored you as much as I did.  We were in a new home.  We were FINALLY through what I was sure would be the hardest season of my life.  We were finally sharing more laughs and smiles than we were sharing tears and heartache.  We were finally happy and everyone who saw us in that time says the same thing.  We appeared so happy, looking forward to the future.  We were.  Or I thought we were.  I was naive.  I should have known that things can always get worse than the worst that you think they’ll be and they did.  We were in a happy place and you still took your life and for me, things got a thousand times worse than they had ever been before.  I am surviving but it’s painful and it’s not the life that I wanted for me or for my children.   What's left of the life we had is shattered into pieces, and there's so many I don't know where to begin to put them back together. I'm good at picking up the pieces and putting them back together, I've done it many times, over and over. This time the pieces don't seem to fit together like they did before.   

I've replayed conversations in my head. Over and over, on repeat until I wish there was a way that I could make it stop. "Promise me you’ll always be there. Promise me, that we’ll get through anything together.” I should have known, but I guess I was blinded where you were concerned. "I promise. I’ll never leave.  I’ll always weather the storm right beside you.”  Yeah right.  After everything that’s happened…all I can say is yeah right.

Why didn’t I see this coming?  You were my person, my heart, how did I not see this coming? That’s one of the many questions that I ask constantly and as much as I wish I could turn off what I feel, it's there. I’ve had people tell me to move on. As if that's something as simple as just saying "I'm going to move on."  As if it’s as easy as deciding what you’re going to eat for breakfast.   As if I can magically stop loving you, and decide that I didn’t want and expect to be married to you for the rest of my life. "Every day gets easier..." It doesn't. Some days it’s harder.  Most days it’s not easier or harder, it’s just different.  I heard someone say that the pain from the loss of a spouse changes, it stops feeling like someone is stabbing and suffocating you all at once and becomes more like the pain of arthritis.  Not as all consuming, but still there and though you can ignore it some of the time, it’s impossible to ignore it all of the time.  You can get through the day but it’s still always there.  Maybe I still have some days that are harder because we share the most amazing daughter. And we have a son that still says he wishes you could come home.  That he misses you.   Our beautiful girl and that handsome boy are the best part of my life; they are my happiness.  They are perfection in an imperfect world. 

I guess I just want to know why everyone seems to get a perfect little family and we didn’t.  My pain most days now, is much more arthritic than a gaping stab wound, but that doesn’t take away from the difficult  moments in which  I want answers that aren’t coming, that won’t ever come.  It doesn’t take away from the times that I miss you, like when I forget to take out the trash because that was always your job.  The days when I need something fixed and I have no idea what the hell I am doing, but I have to figure it out because you’re not there anymore.  Or like how I have no idea how I’ll explain everything that’s happened to the kids when they’re old enough to comprehend.  How I’ll make them believe that you loved them and that if you could have you would be there to watch him take vows to his wife and walk her down the aisle to her husband.  How are they ever going to understand this when I don’t even understand. 

  All I know for sure is that you did something that wrecked so many things and so many people, but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  I’ll keep saying it until I am blue in the face.  I forgive you.  I’m not angry.  I never have been.  Mostly, I just want you to know I don’t think of you as a mistake.  You were a blessing even after everything.


Even through everything that has happened I have loved you.  I have loved you every minute, everyday.  I loved you through the hard season.  I loved you through our triumphs.  I loved you through the trials of parenting Sawyer and through the birth of our perfect daughter.   I loved you even when I hated you and I know that you are gone, that you can’t come back, that my life has to keep going on without you, and that I likely have a long time before I’ll see you again in Heaven, but I can promise I will never stop loving you because of what we share and because you never stop loving your soul mate. I wish I knew how you got to the point that you did or how we could have fixed it or what you were feeling in that moment, but those things don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. Choices were made, and although I didn’t get a say in the biggest choice that altered my life so profoundly, what’s done is done.  

I’ll just end with this,  I prefer to think no one could have loved you the way I did and still do, maybe I was….maybe I am wrong. Maybe I just couldn't love you enough.   Either way, I’ll see you in Heaven, love.

We love you.  We miss you.  Forever.