Following the passage of my late wife in March of 2013, we conducted a Memorial Service. The people in attendance ranged from all walks of our life. Along with my son and daughter there were other family, longtime friends and former roommates, church friends from twenty-five years at St. Mark’s Lutheran and the preschool where she taught, and folks from the caregiving group that had built up around us during eight years of cancer treatments and survivorship. The service opened with a performance of Here Comes the Sun by an incredible musician friend named Matthew Boll, and the service was a testament to the way she lived with love and shared it with everyone in her life.

Before she passed away, I sat with her two weeks prior knowing that things weren’t going the direction she wanted. I knew that after all the strength she’d showed for all those years, her physical strength was wearing out. While she’d had doubts over time as I discovered upon reading her journals years later, she never quit trying to stay alive. That was her nature.

It made me think back to the time before we were married that she decided to run a 10k out in Sycamore, Illinois. A few weeks in advance she went for a few runs, but most of her “training” was doing aerobics classes at the time. That was sufficient for her, because her family––or her brother at least––seemed to have a natural gift of high V02. He became a really credible bike racer back in the early 80s. Linda used to run with me now and then, but walking was her real love. She did that quite a bit all the way through her life.

She signed up for the race and it was a chilly day, so she wore tights and a long-sleeve shirt. Running off almost no training, she broke one hour for the 6.2 distance. These days as I’m much older and run 10:00 pace on a regular basis day-to-day, I rather marvel that she was able to clock that time. I remember her coming into the chute with long blonde hair flying behind her. At the time I was quite the prick about running times, but that impressed me.

The woman had perseverance. Let’s put it that way.

It was a strange thing in those last days to realize that nothing could be done to sustain her life. That day I sat with her to talk about our lives together I told her something like this: “Listen, I know I’ve not been a perfect husband. You’ve had to put up with my flaws for a long time. (25 years). But I want you to know this. In all that time, I’ve always been faithful to you because I love you. Sometimes I’m not even sure you knew how much I loved you. But if there are things I ever did that hurt you, I’m asking your forgiveness now. Because I still love you.”

We cried together that day. I was proud of her for all she’d done for all of us all those years. I wrote a book about that journey called The Right Kind of Pride. The willingness to be vulnerable at times, which was hard for her. One time the members at our church insisted on a “laying on of hands” prayer session and Linda hated the idea. But like me, she understood that we didn’t have all the answers, she and I. We never know anything for certain, if you want to know the truth. Our phrase was always, “It is what it is.”

I attended the Good Friday service the same week she passed away. The pastor welcomed me at the altar that evening, saying, “It’s good that you’re here.”

One of my brothers commented, “You’re walking right into the pain.” That was true. I wanted it that way. For decades I’d learned to deal with pain, even welcome it, in one of the most honest of all ways, by running. As one great African distance runner stated, “If you try to run through the pain, you will never get through it. But if you learn to run with the pain, you can succeed.”

Going forward from those days of pain and loss, I reasoned that if any aspect of our faith was true at all, she had moved fully on in spirit. There was no holding her back. Her life on earth was finished. Back in 2005, I’d already carried my mother’s ashes back from the funeral home after cremation. I knew what it was like to hold a loved one under your arm. In 2013 I received the call from the same funeral home and picked up my wife’s ashes too. The children and I spread some out at a prairie where we all used to walk. I took a small jar to the Daffodil Glade at Morton Arboretum that April once the flowers were in bloom. The rest are buried in a cemetery next to her father where her mother, who is still living and in her late years and will someday soon be buried next to them as well.

So there was closure. There was honesty about how life takes place in its fullest and how it ends in a physical sense. All the people that know me understand that I process these things fully. Yet I didn’t know what came next. I had just gotten a new job that year and was driving the new car we’d just purchased. The April flowers burst from the ground and May flowers opened up in the woodland garden behind our house. Soon here garden burst into life and it would be my job to keep the garden going. That wasn’t easy. Her avocation was gardening. My job was digging holes in the ground for her plants. There’s a big difference.

Our little pup Chuck was then in my care, and I stopped at a hardware store on a spring day to pick up dog food and wound up buying some plants to fill some spots in our backyard. .That’s how we all move beyond the pain. There are spaces we never fully fill in our lives because grief is odd. Yet we all work to live our lives as fully as possible. That’s what’s meant to be. And grant you, we don’t always know what it means. We just keep trying to grow.

This story is a continuing part of the series for my biography Competition’s Son.