The Days I Loved You Most

These conversations coming often, assurances of love, of gratitude, and I echo them back to my children like a lullaby, I love you, I love you, I will always love you. How lucky I was to call you mine.

What a cruel side effect, to lose the scent of cookies in the over, the sweet fragrance of a meadow. Had I known...

No way out of this new reality, this all-consuming motherhood. Demanding more of me than I could have imagined, the saddest happiness I've ever felt, because she's already bigger today than yesterday, already a little less mine. I'm already missing the baby she is, desperate to remember moments I'm certain to forget.

I thought I loved Evelyn when she was beside me, but I was wrong. On these days without her, when I can mistake the breeze for softness of the undersides of her arms intertwined with mine in sleep, when I can hear the musical notes of her laugh and look up to see Jane, when I can hold Eve, and know our great-granddaughter may have her ever-changing eyes, when I am asked for the story about the train and I am still here to tell of her floral perfume that lured me like a spell, when I can open a window and inhale the brine of the sea that always belonged to us, listen to the musical notes of the waves we made our own, lulling me from my grief into the deepest peace, these are the days I love her most.

Look at the beautiful garden we have made, Evelyn. Together.

There are so many reasons I love you, I could probably list them, but the truth is I can’t help it. I never could. I love you because you have this light in you…” I begin to cry, and he strokes my hair. “People are drawn to you, I have always been, you’re a magnetic force. You’re a dreamer and a fighter with more heart than anyone I have ever met.

And there, waiting for me on the ground when it is over, when Jane and I take our bows, is our entire family in the first rows, shiny and clapping and cheering, and my eyes fall on Joseph and suddenly I know it had been real, and he had been witness to it all, to the life we shared together, and to this very night when I finally touched the sky.

My wife, my love, her dreams scribbled in ink, her eyes always on the clouds. She is my symphony.

I thread her fingers with mine, stroke her knuckle with my thumb. “I want to remember everything we shared, this entire life.” I pause, trying to articulate my thoughts, the feelings surfacing on this pilgrimage, wistful for those two young kids, their life just beginnning. “The best way I can think to say goodbye is to revisit it all…falling in love, having our children, all of it…even the days we were lost. It’s not only the happiest days, though they’re a part of it.” Her lower lip begins to tremble. “But it was also the hardest days. The days I was lost, the days I thought I’d lose you. When everything fell apart but you were all I needed.” A tear falls down her cheek, her hand clasped in mine, a hold so tender I never want to let go. “Those are the days I loved you most.

I know I am running, but to what, I’m not sure. My only hope is wherever I run, someday, somehow, we will meet again.

Mom puts her arm around me, and she cries too. I cry for my parents, for my kids, for Connor, for everything I can’t face, everything I stand to lose. I cry for the little girl who dreamed of love, and for the grown woman who is beginning to understand what it means.

Joseph has become my only solace, and I, his. This seems to comfort him, but it frightens me to love him this much. It’s one more thing to lose. I don’t know how to describe it, except moments, notes on a page, that build to create something beautiful and uniquely ours.

I have to go. There is no life for me here, without her. I would follow her anywhere.

I resist the urge to reach for her. If we can’t navigate through our words, will our hearts recognize each other in this new darkness? Can we find our way by touch? I search her face, defined angles replacing her full cheeks. I say, “I love you.

The three-quarter moon shines bright on the water around us, illuminated with flashes of red and green and gold, the air rich with laughter, splashes, and the boom and crackle of distant fireworks, Evelyn in the center of it all. My stomach tightens, knowing what this swim will cost her, of what the next day will bring, but she is not thinking of tomorrow. The ocean a black and sweeping lullaby, our children and grandchildren swirling beacons around her, like fireflies, like silver minnows glittering beneath the surface, flecks of dust dancing in a stream of sunlight, like the clearest night dotted with stars.

I can’t sit near these pianos and feel lost too long. I am in the thousands of strokes of my fingers on the keys, as my spine lengthened and my feet grew to reach the pedals, my mother beside me, music the one place we could always meet.

Well, if you’re so smart, what do you want to be?” “Yours.” My heart thuds, like our bare feet on the dirt path, all our years together racing in my chest, as I pull her chin toward me, and for the first time, kiss her.

Four generations of Meyerses along the Long Island Sound, my kids someday will make it five. Five generations running on the same sand, learning to swim in the same waves. There is no other place so deeply rooted in my soul, no other place I could so truly belong, the only place that calls me home.

I will never see that life unfurl, will never feel those tiny fingers curl around mine, will never see my granddaughter inherit the secrets of motherhood, the way it binds us together. I held my babies as she holds hers, and I should be there to show her, to give her tired eyes a moment to close, to say, give me that baby, the one I've loved for as long as I've loved you, which is to say, before we ever met, for my entire lifetime and forevermore.

The best way I can think to say goodbye is to revisit it all...falling in love

I want to remember everything we shared

Real commitment requires cultivation. It’s not about the tingle in your belly and a rush of adrenaline. It’s not magic

There is no other place so deeply rooted in my soul

If I had a flower for every time I thought of you... I could walk through my garden forever.” —Alfred, Lord Tennyson

But it’s hard to know what to say. Given the chance, how do we begin a goodbye, to include everything they will need to hear after we are gone?

Norally, my parents are impenetrable, a united front to a fault. I doubted the level of their devotion once, doubted everything I once knew. We are in such a better place now, we’ve been in a good place for years.

They have everything they worked for their entire lives – eac other, their family and freedom from running the Oyster Shell – it doesn’t make sense to cut that short, by even a day. But I do know they would do anything for one another. Even if that means blowing up the island they’ve always inhabited, leaving us with the fallout.

Jospeh laughs, smiles sadly. I hope there is an ocean. And a sun to warm us after swimming. I lean against him. I wouldn't mind if it was sort of like this, all over again