Today I was looking up something on google maps and I decided to look at Google Street View. I pulled up my house and it seemed to be a recent picture. I knew Patrick was alive when it was taken because the lawn was freshly mown in his signature diagonal style. I happened to find a sort of date stamp and it said April 2016. I became obsessed with trying to find out exactly when it was taken! I could tell it was morning but I was puzzled that my car was not in front. I knew it wasn’t after he died because of the fact that there were no cars in front of my house.
From April 20th until at least the end of the month my street always looked like a party was going on. When I talked to a neighbor across the street she said she thought we were having a graduation party. In April? For a week and a half? 24/7? If only that could be the case.
I am constantly looking for remnants of Patrick’s life. I always hope that I will find some small part of him. Today I found his juggling set, it included some sort of knives! 😲 I’m glad he never tried to teach the girls! I also found a box that appeared to contain the contents of his desk at the VA. There was a Rolodex, a new pair of insoles 😜, a yellow rain poncho, a custom made mouse pad of the “teNyenhuis girls” that I had forgotten about and a photo album of baby pictures of the girls. I was happy that he had a whole photo album and I remembered how proud he always was of his girls.
As usual I felt incomplete when I finished looking through the box. I am never going to find something that replaces him. I’m also not going to stop wishing that I could step into one of those pictures and go back and enjoy my life even more than I did the first time. I try not to have regrets but I also think that I did not fully appreciate what a wonderful gift our love and marriage was. At the same time my heart is warmed every time I find a new artifact from our relationship. We DID have a great life together. That life is over but my life continues. I just need to keep heading toward my new normal.