Lightning in a Bottle

Thank you to everyone who came to Jeremy’s service today. If you were unable to make it, I feel your heart as well and appreciate you. Jeremy was never a person who particularly cared whether something was celebrated on a certain day. What matters is sharing each other’s presence when we are together. I know each one of you has individually and collectively enriched Jeremy’s life.

Below are the words I shared at the service.

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First, I would like to thank everyone for being here. For organizing this celebration. For honoring Jeremy. And I thank you for listening to what I’m about to share with you.

Today is the eighth anniversary of our marriage. In total, I had Jeremy’s presence in my life for almost exactly one week short of fifteen years. That is a long time, and simultaneously, not nearly enough.

A lover is many things. He is a companion, a grindstone to sharpen your wits with, an enthusiastic conversationalist during road trips, perfectly content to have the excuse of being trapped in a car together for hours and days. He is a hand to reach the top shelf at the grocery aisle. A lover is warmth, a cuddle partner, someone to pull your sleeve while you try to take off your jacket in a cramped space.

But in the most fundamental sense, no different from any other human we meet, a lover is a fellow traveler. While we walked together, hand in hand, we shed old clothes, tried on new shoes, and pocketed riverstones that glistened in the brilliant sunlight. And that is what we are here for today. A paradoxical human desire to memorialize the ephemeral beauty we are so fortunate to have captured along the way as companions in life.

A noble cause, but there is a problem. How could one go on to do anything when half of oneself is missing? There lies the theme. A pattern that keeps showing up. Death nourishes life. Joyful tears. Peace in sorrow. As long as we continue putting one foot in front of the other, we are walking paradoxes. A part of me is undeniably and irrevocably gone, and somehow at the same time, I feel whole and complete. The time we shared, the life we had, so too are they permanent and irrevocable.

From my travel with Jeremy, I learned the true meaning of hope. He had given me the choice to believe in a permanent handhold in the pit of despair. Not despite losing the fight to cancer in the end, but because of the loss. I learned that a goal is but a wish unless that is the only future we envision ourselves in and see no other alternatives. Unless every single action we take serves to bring that vision into reality. I learned what it meant to really believe in something. To believe in myself. To believe it is never too late to try something new. To always have the youthful curiosity and courage to re-write our stories.

These are my lightning in a bottle. The invaluable gifts I take with me on my journey.  So together, let us remember Jeremy. A fellow traveler who shined brightly with patience and kindness, who was vulnerable and genuine in his humanity, who always listened and made us feel heard, who above all else, loved hard, saving nothing in the tank.

Finally, I would like to share a poem with you written by Nicolas Evans. It’s called I walk within you.

If I be the first of us to die,

Let grief not blacken long your sky.

Be bold yet modest in your grieving.

There is change but not a leaving.

For just as death is part of life,

The dead live on forever in the living.

For all the gathered riches of our journey,

The moments shared, the mysteries explored,

The steady layer of intimacy stored.

The things that made us laugh or weep or sing,

The joy of sunlit snow or first unfurling of the spring,

The wordless language of look and touch,

The knowing, each giving and each taking,

These are not flowers that fade,

Nor trees that fall and crumble.

Nor are they stone,

For even stone cannot the wind and rain withstand

And mighty mountain peaks in time reduce to sand.

What we were, we are.

What we had, we have.

A conjoined past imperishably present.

So when you walk the woods where once we walked together

And scan in vain the dappled bank beside you for my shadow,

Or pause where we always did upon the hill to gaze across the land,

And spotting something, reach by habit for my hand,

And finding none, feel sorrow start to steal upon you,

Be still.

Clear your eyes.

Breathe.

Listen for my footfall in your heart.

I am not gone but merely walk within you.

Thank you.