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Maybe I should call them.
I stare at the boxes for a while, wondering if now is a good time to see what’s in them, whether I’m ready to see what’s in there. I could’ve been standing there for minutes or hours, I’m not sure but I finally take a deep breath and grab the first box.
It’s a random assortment of stuff that means nothing. I breathe out, relieved it’s an easy one, full of pictures and scratches of paper. I expect to feel emotional looking at pictures of Amy and me, but I’m not. There’s ones from Homecoming, standing next to me, both of us giving awkward, closed-mouth smiles.
I remember how my heart fluttered when I saw her in that dress.
I put that picture to the side and look at another one. All I feel is warm nostalgia, not an ounce of sadness.
Amy’s diaries are in there, something I was never tempted to read until now. I asked her once why she wrote in journals instead of including it into her prayers and she said with a wink, “God doesn’t need to know everything.”
I open one with a ballerina on front, the spine cracking. The dates range from high school to our marriage when she was in remission to the last days before she passed. I flip the last filled page.
The date is exactly one month before she died.
Dear Journal,
Long time no talk!
So, it looks like cancer will get me. I’m so blessed to have the time I had and to find the love of my life. My darling husband is right next to me as I write this, and he’s trying to look.
Little did she know I would be looking now.
Sometimes I love him so much it hurts. I worry what he will be like when I’m gone. I want him to be sad, for sure, but I also want him to eventually move on. Maybe after I’m gone ten years he can find someone else.
I shake my head. That’s just a coincidence.
I hope after I’m gone he can buy that house with land we always talked about, that he can find a job that makes him happy, and he can be a dad. It kills me (haha I’m so funny) that I can’t give him a baby. That we ran out of time. That’s my biggest life regret. However, God knows best, and He knew I wouldn’t be around forever. Leaving Jackson is the only thing that really sucks about all of this. If I had to leave a child as well, well, that would destroy me.
I reach out to rub my nose and wetness covers my hand. I’m crying as I read this, the tears staining the pages.
I hope I have connections from heaven to find her for him. It’s morbid to think of who will take my place, who Jackson will love in the future. I hope Jackson can feel me when he finds her. That it’s okay to move on. I hope he continues to grow stronger and keeps going after his dreams. I know he will. He’s so much stronger than I am.
“I’m really not,” I say out loud, that Amy’s spirit is in this attic and not Mildred, the gold Rush ghost. “You were the strong one.”
I keep reading although I’m full-on sobbing now.
I’ve been so lucky in my life. I found the love of my life, even if I may not be the only one of his. I saw the world with him, and we had once-in-a-lifetime experiences together. I just worry that both of our lives will end when I take my last breath.
I put the diary down on my lap. I became my late wife’s biggest fear about dying.
I shut everyone out. I escaped from the town we called home. I never bought the house we talked about. All I did was hoard my money and work to avoid the stinging loneliness of my life.
Until I came home.
Until a blond ball of sunshine came into my office, insisting on meeting me, although I was the opposite, a big rain cloud, ready to burst.
It feels like a knife to the gut to know my wife worried this would happen.
That I would stay in this perpetual gray.
That I would meet someone exactly ten years after she’s gone.
That I might push this new woman away.
Amy would be so disappointed in me. Most of all, I’m disappointed in myself.
My dad could go to therapy, overcome his sadness, and carry grief like an accessory, not like a five-thousand-pound weight vest.
