Dishes and dreams disrupted

In loving memory of someone who might never die

At 10:10pm tonight, I was washing dishes in the first house Dan and I shared.

Each “Gourmet Garden” piece I loaded into the dishwasher reminded me how he argued with his mom about us choosing it for our wedding registry. (She thought we ‘deserved’ fancier china, and we both wanted something floral and practical.)

Washing his old Henckels chef’s knife reminded me of all the times he cooked us something a little spicier than I would’ve made it. I was a better baker (I’m precise about measuring and he, well, wasn’t); but he was a better cook 😏

Wiping grains of rice off a plate reminded me of watching him teach his niece how to make sushi.

Looking out the kitchen sink window to the now-overgrown back yard reminded me of the raised beds he had built to nurture his beloved fragrant irises and lilies.

For 19 years, the mantel urn and the half-barrel planter with his ashes have reminded me that he’s dead by all standard definitions. But I’ve found comfort in the saying “Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.” (George Eliot, aka Mary Anne Evans).

Even as some of Dan’s dear friends, like Bob and Henry, slowly cross over to join him in the next life, I still hear family and other friends commenting on how much Dan is missed, and telling stories about their adventures with him.

Every so often, my mom’s digital photo frame flashes up the engagement photo of my oldest nephew (who Dan loved dearly) and his fiancee. She’s wearing the heirloom ring Dan gave me that was his grandmother’s; the story behind it is now theirs to carry forward.

Taking the label off my drink bottle (so my now-husband can tell it’s mine and not his) is my everyday tribute to Dan’s long-time habit of twisting the pop-tab on his Coke sideways to tell his drink apart from everyone else’s.

March always reminds me vividly of Dan’s last weeks and how valiantly he fought to be one of the 5% that survived his stage of lung cancer. So much bleak irony: after he’d overcome so many years of wrestling with depression, he’d finally built with me the life that he’d dreamed of having and wanted to keep living … only to be thrown into this fight and have that life taken away from both of us too soon.

But most days, I remember his joyfulness, his sly humor, his penchant for good-natured pranks, his enthusiastic adoption of my 6 cats, and how he loved people and life and his ‘farm’ and me.

Dan still lives.