A Christmas gift

Our second Christmas without Ian (2 down, maybe 20-30 to go?) and we made our trek to the Ballard cemetary to place fresh flowers at Ian's grave, like we have done so many times over the past 18 months but this time was different.  This time, there was a gift waiting for us.  Ian had a visitor, who we dubbed 'Oliver'.  When we drove up to Ian's grave (gosh, that sounds so wrong to say....Ian's grave) there was this beautiful, calico cat just sitting up on top of his headstone like he owned the place.  In all our time out here at Ballard, we'd never seen a cat.  We walked up to him, expecting him to run away but it was obvious, he meant to stay around and just wanted to be petted.  In fact, Eric had a hard time getting him to get off the headstone so he could clean it. He stayed around the whole time we were there and he was the friendliest cat. Amy named him Oliver and we seriously thought of taking him home; he was friendly and beautiful and was there at just the right moment.  He was also obviously clean and well fed and therefore probably belonged to someone who loved him.  But we toyed with the idea that he was a sign; maybe he was a sweeter version of Emmett (who's ashes we had secretly (until now) buried next to Ian, maybe he was a Christmas present????).

We asked him if he wanted to come home with us and he said yes (we are fluent in meow) so I went in search of the groundskeepers to see if they had a 'cemetery cat'.  Unfortunately, for us, he did have a home with the neighbors living next door.  The groundskeeper said he comes back and forth but usually stays in a certain area of the cemetery - today, for whatever reason, he ventured into our area.  So he wasn't a sign - he was a gift and for a brief moment, he was ours & Ians'
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Udon noodles = laughter

The one thing that penetrates through this grief into my soul is worship.  We sang the song, "Overcome", a few weeks ago at church.  My first thought when we would sing this song used to be that God didn't overcome Ian's cancer, He could have, but He didn't.  This time I thought He finally had, in the end, overcame Ian's disbelief, his doubts.  In Ian's final moments of consciousness, when we had to stop him from trying to get off the bed and he couldn't believe the wonder of what he was seeing and had to go find Michael, who was showing him all these wondrous things, he SAW what waited for him.  God overcame all the questions that Ian had then, in that moment.  I suddenly missed him so terribly I couldn't stop the tears.  But I could feel him, I could hear him reassuring me that God had overcome.

One of the things that haunts me is one of the last things Ian wrote in his journal - that God couldn't plan His way out of a paper bag.  That arose because of the final prayer request Eric wrote after we found out Ian was terminal. Eric included the phrase 'perfect plan'. That morning in church, it was as if I could hear Ian reassuring me that Eric choice of wording had been correct.  That taking him when He did was the perfect plan and now, Ian saw it too.

It doesn't make me miss him less, but it helps.

The holidays have been hard this year.  I think last year we were still in shock - we missed him, terribly, but the shock acted as a kind of buffer.  I don't know if it's possible, but I think I miss him even more this year.  We did Thanksgiving out of town this year which made it different and perhaps easier.  We're trying to do more of Christmas than we have the last two years; our hearts aren't in it but we push ahead knowing that it's what we need to do.  It just takes incredibly long to decorate when you only do one box at a time (I've accumulated a lot of  Christmas boxes over the past 24 years).  Tonight was 'ornament' night.  Our tradition has been to purchase an ornament for each of the kids and our family every year to commemorate whatever was significant in our lives that year.  The plan had always been that the kids would take their ornaments with them when they moved out and on their own (I didn't want their trees to be empty those first few years).  Amy has all hers but we still have Alex's & Ian's.  Eric & I were doing ok putting them all on the tree until we got to an ornament we had both forgotten about ~ it's a memorial ornament with Ian's picture on it.  Around his picture it says "God saw him getting tired, a cure not meant to be so He wrapped His arms around him and whispered 'Come with Me'."  That was our undoing, I think it was the shock of seeing it - we knew about the others we would be seeing but this one we forgot about. 

I had just made the comment that decorating the tree isn't fun any more when Eric started laughing - he had just opened the next ornament ~ another of Ian's .....his bowl of Udon noodles. Ian loved Udon noodles.  We both instantly knew that we were given the gift of laughter to help us finish our tree full of memories.