Eight years ago today, I married Marc.
Today is our eighth wedding anniversary.
It is also my first one without him.
And because apparently life has absolutely no concern for appropriate emotional pacing, the moving company started packing my house today.
I didn’t plan that.
I didn’t even pay attention to the date when we scheduled it.
But here we are.
Eight years after I married him, nine months after I lost him, strangers are wrapping dishes and taping boxes and dismantling the home where we built so much of our life.
They’re almost finished. A couple more hours tomorrow morning, and then everything gets loaded onto a semi and starts heading west.
And I’m…
Okay?
I’m not scared.
I’m not particularly sad.
I think I might be numb.
Yesterday, people came and went all day. Friends stopped by. There were hugs and tears and laughter and goodbyes. And today, so many incredibly thoughtful people have checked in on me, knowing what this day is and knowing what else is happening at the same time.
And somewhere in all of that, I realized something I hadn’t really considered before.
They weren’t only saying goodbye to me.
They were saying goodbye to him here, too.
This house held Marc.
It held birthday parties and Christmas mornings and ordinary Tuesdays. Arguments and dinners and kids growing up. Laughter and sickness and love and fear and the thousand completely unremarkable moments that, looking back, were actually the whole damn thing.
For ten years, these walls held our family.
And everyone who loved him could feel that yesterday.
It wasn’t just Greg and me saying goodbye to this house.
They had to say goodbye to him here, too.
Before Kristine left yesterday, she quietly put something on the counter in my bathroom.
The speech she gave at our wedding eight years ago.
I found it after everyone was gone.
It was perfect the first time.
It was perfect again.
And I cried.
Hard.
Not gentle, sentimental anniversary tears. Longing tears. The kind that come from somewhere underneath your ribs.
God, I miss him.
I miss my husband.
I miss the man I spent thirteen years raising our kids with. The man who loved them with everything he had. The man I built this ridiculous, beautiful, complicated life with.
We loved each other beyond measure.
And MAN, is there a void where he used to be.
Sometimes I swear I can physically feel his ABSENCE in the world.
Like there is supposed to be a person standing in a particular place in the universe, and there simply isn’t.
And yet—
I feel his PRESENCE, too.
I don’t know how else to explain it.
Every now and then there is a flutter. A breath. A breeze. A clear feeling on my skin that stops me for just a second.
And I know.
Sometimes it’s a song.
I’ll be driving or standing somewhere wishing desperately that he were here. Wishing he could hug me. Tell me it’s going to be okay. Tell me he’s proud of me.
And then, because subtlety was never really our thing, She’s My Little Boo Thang starts playing on a station where it has absolutely no business playing.
Yep.
There you are.
But today was bigger.
Marc’s mom needed a sign from him today.
She was outside, bagging up leaves to take home for her garden, and she asked him to send her one. Something to let her know he was still here. Still watching over us.
And then she looked up.
There was a cross stretched across the sky.
And not a tiny one, either.
She sent me the picture and said,
“It was big just like Marc would’ve done it. He wouldn’t have done a little cross. It had to be big.”
And I laughed.
Because of course it did.
Of course, Marc.
Then she told me the strangest part.
As they got closer to Shepherd, it started to disappear.
Like, in her words:
“OK, they saw it. I’m done.”
I don’t know what anyone else believes about signs.
And I don’t need to.
I know that on the eighth anniversary of the day I married her son, his mom stood outside and asked him to let her know he was still with us.
And something enormous appeared in the sky.
Big. Dramatic. Impossible to miss.
Very Marc.
Your mom saw it, babe.
I saw it.
Message received.
And maybe that’s part of the answer to the question I keep asking myself today.
Why am I okay?
Why am I not sobbing while people pack our life into boxes?
How do I keep moving through these days?
How am I calmly watching people dismantle the home that held nearly everything sacred to me for the last ten years?
How am I actually okay with packing up my life and walking away?
Maybe part of the answer is that almost none of that precious cargo lives here anymore.
And that is a very heavy space to wake up in every day.
But I think there is another answer, too.
I used to think the memories lived here.
They don’t.
We do.
The people who were here carry them.
Our kids carry them.
Our family carries them.
Our friends carry them.
I carry them.
A house is walls until somebody makes it a home.
And we made one hell of a home here.
But this doesn’t feel like home anymore.
So tomorrow they’ll finish packing our things.
Then they’ll load them onto a truck and send them west.
And shortly after, I’ll follow.
I’ll drive away from the house where I loved my husband.
Where we raised our family.
Where I watched him live.
Where I watched him leave.
And somehow, I don’t feel like I’m leaving him behind.
Maybe that’s why I’m not afraid.
Maybe that’s why I’m not as sad as I thought I would be.
Maybe I’m not numb after all.
Maybe I just finally understand something I couldn’t have understood nine months ago.
He doesn’t live here.
And neither do the thirteen years we had together.
Those belong to me.
They belong to us.
Eight years ago today, I promised to walk through this life with you.
I thought that meant we would grow old together. That I would get to be with you until the end of our days.
I know now that I don’t get to have that.
But I did get to live with you until the end of yours.
And that is pretty profound when you really think about it.
We got to love each other until your very last breath.
I was there.
I loved you then.
I love you now.
And somehow, I’m learning that walking forward without you beside me isn’t the same thing as walking forward without you.
Tomorrow, our things start heading west.
Soon, I will too.
And I’m not leaving you behind.
You are in our children. Our stories. Our laughter. The way I love. The person I became because I got to be yours.
And sometimes, apparently, you’re a ridiculously enormous cross in the Michigan sky because your mother asked you for a sign and, naturally, you weren’t going to do anything halfway, nor would you ever let her down.
Happy anniversary, my love.
Eight years married.
Thirteen years loved.
A lifetime changed.
I simply adore you.
I always have.
And I always will.
My love. ❤️🩹
