Today we celebrate this man. We do so with heavy grateful hearts, heavy from the sheer weight of our loss, but full with gratitude for the blessing that we know we are eternally bound to him.
All of us wish we could call back time, rearrange the story, change the details, fix what should never have transpired. Instead we visit his grave and long for the time when we will be together again.
If there were just one word that would describe this giant of a soul it would be the word SACRIFICE! He lived every second of his life for others. He was a man who was always more concerned about those he served rather than himself.
His family was EVERYTHING. We were his EVERYTHING. And everything he did in life was to secure our happiness. He always drove the crappiest car so I could have the new one. If he were watching a movie or reading a book, he was choosing what his family liked so he could converse and enjoy what his family enjoyed. If he were with his girls, he was doing what his girls liked to do. If he were with his boys, he was doing what his boys loved to do. If he were with his wife, he was doing what his wife loved to do. He lived his life in constant service to others. He was the supreme giver, and nothing was considered a sacrifice to him.
And so my heart continues to ache. I am stuck. I am stuck in pain and the unsurety as how to fill the giant chasm his death has left in me. For surely so much of me went with him.
C. S. Lewis wrote a book entitled "A Grief Observed." He writes, "For in grief nothing "stays put." One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?
But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?
How often --- will it be for always? --- how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, "I never realized my loss till this moment? The same leg is cut off time after time.....
I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all night with a toothache, thinking about the toothache and about lying awake.' That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each endless day in grief."
I understand C. S. Lewis. I understand the pain he suffered in the loss of his Beloved wife.
Suffering has made me more aware. I now read about other people and their suffering. I read about tragic events in the news or I listen to one thing after another on the radio or the t.v. and I watch people go about their mundane lives and I wonder if they realize how precious time is and how important each and every opportunity to give love is. Opportunity knocks time and time again! It calls to us daily to reach out and love in fullness. Glade was a man who answered every knock. He rarely missed an opportunity to love in the full sense of the word. He answered by opening the door wide, steady as a rock, standing there always with his massive heart full of love, ready to give not some, but all.
That is the kind of man I married. How I ever got so lucky is beyond me, for surely I have never once deserved so much. I think perhaps the reason I feel so lost and empty was because I was born with a hole in me. And the man I married didn't care if I had a giant leak in my core. He just continued to fill me up time and time again. He never got tired of filling. He never got tired of giving. It was what he loved.... he loved GIVING and he loved LOVING! That is who he was and what he stood for. He loved loving people and I could spend the rest of my life working to be like him and never come remotely close.
Happy Father's Day Honey. You set a standard few can match. And nowhere in this life can a better example of Simple, Solid, Honest, Loving and True be found.
I love you so much. Miss you even more.
Thanks for being our HERO!
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