"I Am Always Remembering..."

This morning around 3:00 am, as I lay awake listening to my husband softly snoring beside me, without warning my mind drifted back nearly 20 years to the sound of another man softly breathing beside me in that same room. Unlike my husband and I, that beloved one and I always retired together. Every night, he and I would climb the stairs together, often hand in hand. We'd prepare for bed and pray together and we'd sleep in each other's embrace. And when we'd make love, it was everything they sing about in songs like this...

I thought about this song as I laid there in the darkness this morning and of how it encapsulates everything I felt on all of those nights as he and I climbed our own stairway to heaven. That our love ended as it did and for the reasons that it did have become the greatest lament of my long life. But alas, as I have done every morning since since that first morning when I knew I loved that man, in my prayers in the darkness of this morning I thanked God that I lived to know a love like that in my life. Despite all the turmoil and turbulence of a life now long-lived, a pleasant tide now brushes against the shores of my memories and now I sometimes can remember more of the good than the bad... and more of the love than the sad.

"I am always remembering..."

"Fear Eats the Soul"