August 30, 2004
Happy Birthday Sugar
Today marks Susan's 61st birthday. A year ago, barely a month after her passing, I wrote her a letter which can be found here.
Everything in that letter is still true, and I couldn't say it better now than I did then. My grief has mellowed somewhat over the past year. Instead of a sharp pain, it is a dull ache.
Saturday night I hosted a gathering of the "Senior Saints" from Town North. Several guests commented on the furnishings that Susan had picked out for our home. As she was leaving one commented, "Susan would have really liked this." I agree. She loved showing hospitality, and even my clumsily administered use of her things could not eclipse the style and grace of their mistress.
The photo above is one I found several years before her passing. I think it was shot when she was 2 or 3 years old. She clearly did not want her picture taken! Sometimes, when I was about to do something that I thought would displease her, I would get out that photo, place it on a shelf above me in my study, look at it for awhile and think to myself: "you'd better not do what your planning." As an adult her beautiful face hardly ever showed displeasure with me, so I used the photo as a surrogate for her inner self to figure out what I should and should not do. I'd think to myself, "If I do this, will I get a face looking as unhappy as that?" It usually, (but not always) worked.
I'm struck now by how the world has gone on since my wife's death. Even my world has gone on. I remember a year ago quoting from my book on grief: They(grieving people) may want to stop the world. After all, a significant person just died; how can the world just keep going on? There is a sense in which I still feel that way. Yet this is to be a year of Jubilee, and in the Lord's providence I am to go on without her. Yet, even in the year of Jubilee there is to be a remembrance of the past. So in my mind, I picture on this date 61 years ago a hospital room in Oklahoma City. There, Helen Sanders smiles down at her new born daughter, while Elwood the new father, dressed in this Army AirForce uniform, stands by her bed, not caring that any moment an armed MP might barge in and arrest him for being AWOL. They decide to name the baby girl after Elwood's mother, Susie, whom her grandchildren would call Mamby. And so she is duly registered by the powers that be as Susan Gayle Sanders.
That baby girl was destined not only to bring great joy into Helen and Elwood's life, but into the lives of many others as well. Yet, there will be no biographies written on her life, no best sellers on amazon.com. Nonetheless, in the volume that really counts, the Lamb's Book of Life, there will be recorded these words:
Her children arise and call her blessed;
her husband also, and he praises her:
"Many women do noble things,
but you surpass them all."
Happy Birthday, Sugar. I miss you more than ever. And I will love you to the end.
Your loving husband,
J.