Dearest Pam,
As I pray for you this morning I am looking at the newly reframed word art that I did for you some nine years ago. You know this, but for others, I asked many family and friends to describe you in one word. The results became a piece of word art wherein the more frequent a word was used the more pronounced it is in the picture.
Beautiful, hope, reverent, loving, adventurous and huggable are the most pronounced, but there are others, generous, gracious, compassionate, faithful, classy, intelligent, faithful, nice and patient are also prominently displayed. All of these I confirm, with the possible exception of the last one (kidding 😉) and I do so with a sense of authority, because what human, living or dead, knows you better than me?
The interesting thing is that for every one of these words, an image or multiple images appear in my minds eye; memories of people, places and things that reinforce each of these words for me. I’d like to recount just a few of them.
Beautiful: I recall so many vibrant sunrises and golden sunsets that caused your beautiful face to be even more aglow. Even your dermatologist has confessed jealously over that olive skin, absent the wrinkles most of us find in our latter years.
Hope: oh sweetie, how many times I would have given up on someone but for your encouragement to hang on to hope, to fan its dying embers back to life. You simply won’t give up on people, and I love you all the more for that, because it also means you have never given up on me, which is probably core to our more than five decades of marriage.
Reverent: next to this word art is a picture someone gave you recently taken from someone sitting behind us in church. Your head looks weary as it rests upon my shoulder, but your hand is raised in worship. There’s never been a person or situation where you failed, in reverential awe, to see God at work and worthy of your attention. Be that through your labor, your attention or your worship, you find the gold in every person and every situation, digging relentlessly until it is exposed; and I love you for that.
Adventurous: many people believe that to truly be adventurous one must throw caution to the wind. You defy that definition. You are always game to venture out, well outside your comfort zone, but never without an analysis of the potential costs involved. Would that I had heeded that analysis more often through the years, but I love that you have always been willing to go. Whether it means sharing four cabins and two heads with total strangers for a week on a sailboat in the Caribbean, backpacking across the Cotswolds or driving across the country in an RV, you have always been there for me., you’ve always been game for an adventure.
Huggable: I can remember when someone came looking for you and the panic that appeared on their face when they learned you were not available. I asked if I could help and the response was no, they needed a hug and only yours would do. Not your wisdom, though there is plenty there, not your money, though you share it freely, not your help, even though you rarely refuse it; they simply wanted a hug. as they turned away disappointed, they said you hugs are medicinal, even healing. They were correct.
I could go on, but this exercise is too emotionally draining for me, although I would like to state the obvious: I left one out: loving. The reason for that is that in every one of these brief stories, your loving, kind nature is revealed.
What more could a man hope for in this life than to walk alongside such a woman. I love you more than life and no amount of words, no revealing etymologies nor failing superlatives can express how much I love you.
Brad