He called her "Angel"

I did not know her well. We knew her as Marie, but her husband called her "Angel." Yesterday morning, unexpectedly, she became one. I did not spend much time with her, but every time I saw her, even the first time we met, she gave me a warm and meaningful hug. She was a veteran. She was a teacher. And I know she was the center of her husband's life and the heart and soul of her young daughter's world.

She gave us a big box of chocolates for Christmas. I kept meaning to thank her. I'm sure I threw away the card along with its sentiments without any thought that the words were written by a living hand that would soon never hold a pen again. Every time either of us would open that box for a piece of candy (and we opened a lot), we would think of how sweet and thoughtful she was. Now that still half-full box sits on our pantry shelf looking like a shiny gold coin amongst a pile of wooden nickels.

Every day at my desk, including right now, I rest my feet on a small wooden footstool Marie and I jokingly fought over at a garage sale. She allowed me to have it after I offered to buy and donate another sale item (I think it was a printer) that she mentioned her school could use. I have never forgotten, and certainly won't now, the strong, energetic, and grateful hug she gave me after we made that deal.

This morning, her husband and her daughter, if they slept at all last night, woke up to their first full day without her.

At times like this, I'm always reminded of an Emily Dickinson poem that reads:

The bustle in a house
The morning after death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon Earth -

The sweeping up the heart
And putting love away
We shall not want to use again
Until eternity.

I understand Dickinson's meaning, but I know that their hearts will remain in pieces on the floor, and the love they want to use again will never be put away.

When such a sudden permanent absence turns your world upside down, jerks away your footing, and leaves you literally at such a dark and helpless loss, every single mundane, necessary, and automatic living act seems incongruous with the emptiness you feel inside. Somehow disrespectful. And when you see everyone else going about their business as if nothing has changed, you can't imagine how the world can keep turning when the steady, familiar rotation of your world came to a screeching halt on what would have otherwise been just another normal day. Just a square on a calendar with a number in it. Time takes all the days before it and sends them out to sea. Our hearts and minds keep swimming. Time will take all the days after it and give them a painful significance. Our living bodies will trudge through deep wet sand under thick water and against cruel waves toward a new steadiness, a new familiarity we will be forced to accept.

I don't think time ever heals wounds like this. It may continue to wrap its bandage thicker and thicker, but that bandage will yet remain loose and penetrable by even the most unexpected flashes of memory and even the most otherwise mundane living acts that mark the numbered boxes on our calendars.