Most people have no imagination when it comes to the pain of burying your best friend, your companion, the one person in life that makes you whole, the one who listens to your every whim, the person who tolerates your every annoyance, the person you sleep next to which immediately calms your breathing, the person who should still be alive, the man I lived for, my joy, my everything! I’ve decided few people know the depth of real love and the pain of burying it beneath the earth.
My kids finally gave me a deadline ---Memorial Day 2016. “Mom, dad needs a proper stone”, they said. Well, it’s not that I hadn’t been working on it. After Glade died, I started wandering through cemetery after cemetery. It became the road to try and find some form of healing or perhaps it just helped me begin to believe it. I cannot count the distance I’ve traveled, even New Zealand, and Australia, all around the state of Utah, Idaho, Oregon, California, Nevada, hunting, looking, assimilating, soaking in my trauma, searching for that perfect stone. If one is married to the perfect man, (perfect for me), one must have a perfect headstone! How contradictory is that? I already had perfect. Headstones embody death, there is nothing perfect about death. This must be irony. Now, as I think about all those cemeteries I stood in, oh how I wish I had written down all the names, and all the dates, and all the impressions that came to me as I stood silent in front of one marker after another. I tried to envision the life that came before death, how they came to rest beneath the earth, and who was left behind to hurt!
Therefore, I can say with all surety, when it comes to Glade's headstone, I've never worked harder or taken more thought to anything I have ever done in my life! I think I did over a hundred drafts fixing one detail after another. Right at the very last second, we had problems with Glade's hand because of the size of the detailing, so with no time to contact the artist, I personally had to draw Glade's hand on his fishing pole. I am so proud of that. I have no drawing skills, but every time I look at that hand I know with divine help, one can do anything. So here I am, 21 and 1/2 months later and finally, the deed is done.
I wanted everything to be supremely personal and unique to Glade. I was able to find a Green stone, yes, the official color, pine green. I was so excited when I found it. It's so pretty in the sun, just barely green in the morning light. Glade LOVED GREEN! In fact we use to tease him because he'd hardly wear any other color. Always fished in his green scrub top! Miss you honey, doing everything and anything in your scrubs!
Here is where I have to rave about Josh Rudd, of Rudd Funeral. If you want a company that is reasonably priced and cares for people on a personal level, call Rudd Funeral Home. I was sick of big business companies and saw how Joe and Josh Rudd dealt with my niece, whose little daughter suffered a tragic death. When it comes to death, close and personal is what counts and that is their mantra! Also, Memorial Monuments, the best headstone company I've seen. These two companies are seriously the two best companies I have ever worked with! Josh has the patience of Job. With every little change his long suffering with me was truly something to see. There is a young man who understands grief, he deserves a medal! I will never look at Glade's headstone and not think of Josh Rudd's supreme kindness! The individual who blasted the stone, Steve H., also set it for me as well. His craftsmanship is the finest I've seen and I've seen a lot of headstones. He told me in all of the years he'd been doing this he had never blasted a base. I saw this while in New Zealand, a base that had been done in roses. Glade loved the mountains, we spent lots of time there as a family, so I designed the pines and quaking aspens to surround his base. I was so happy when I saw it in real life. It’s beautiful and unique to him.
Glade's cousin Travis Crowther is a full time artist. His work is amazing and I just have to say, he totally saved my life. I had tried to take two images of Glade and I and turn them into pencil sketches in photoshop. It just wasn't working. Time and time again I tried to get it right. Now we were down to the wire on time and I had just basically given up and decided having things done by memorial was never going to happen. Again I know it was Glade who totally inspired me to call Trav. That is a story for another day! When I called Travis, he immediately got in his truck and came right to my home. He listened to all my ideas, sketched a rough draft to make sure it was what I wanted and then took a photo of Glade and a photo of me back to his studio where he worked on it till the wee hours of the morning. When he came back the next day with the sketches, they were so beautiful I cried. Everything he did totally changed the entire back of the design. Suddenly everything fell together, just the way I had envisioned it for so long. I can't thank Travis enough! Glade loved to fish and I loved taking his picture while he was fishing. I told him, “Honey when you’re done with this surgery business, I want to take you to the river by Em’s house and take the coolest fly fishing photo of you and hang it on my wall. He agreed. I hope they have cameras in heaven! I know he’s fly fishing there! How I wish I could take his picture.
Glade spoke Danish and the Danish inscription on the front translated means, "Love is stronger than death." We were always planning to go back to his mission. I was always looking forward to a trip to Denmark, with my own personal guide. I loved his Danish. When he came home from his mission and gave his report, I sat in the audience wondering about this handsome guy that couldn’t remember his English words. “Jeg Elsker Dig, Honey. Jeg vil elske dig for evigt!"
I wanted people to know he was a dentist. He was such a hardworking honest man and he loved doing dentistry. He had an elderly lady come into his office one day who had been years without her crown. She lost it down her bathroom sink. Glade shut down his office at lunch time and took his assistant’s husband over to her house and they found her crown in her drain pipe and then he polished it back up and put it back in her mouth, saving her the price of a new crown. He was such an honest, loving, hard working man.
Since his death, he sends me hearts . . . serious, in all different ways and right when I need them. So two hearts joined forever on the front and one heart on the back, because no man loved fishing like him, and no man has ever caught my heart like he did! He was always waiting for that big catch in any stream or river. It was I who landed the biggest and the best catch ever . . . him! I don't know how I did it. Truly it was providence!
I had the hardest time knowing what to put on the back for the inscription above the kid's names. I sat one night forever lamenting over what to put there. In the late night hours I suddenly felt his promptings. "The Blog, Honey!" I remember feeling so excited at the thought. For years we’ve had a family blog and Glade loved it. He loved pictures and reading about his own family. He was always showing it to people at his work, always braggin' up his family. He was our biggest fan, he truly was. He loved that we have always referred to ourselves as, "The Crow's Nest" We've been the Crows forever. It was a perfect idea! (Thanks honey!)
And nothing brought Glade more joy than being with his family. Glade always said, you can never spend enough time with family! He loved the quote on our blog, "The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family." by Thomas Jefferson. And so it reads in white at the bottom of his stone, a testament to how he loved us and how he felt about us! Loving us is what he did best!
When Glade's life was brutally taken from him, it was August 3rd, the day before his 60th birthday, and never in my life have I seen such intense rain in the driest month of the year. Everyone in my family could feel Glade's tears falling. His sorrow was so present in that rain. Day after day it fell, soaking the earth, soaking everything within its reach. It hung on us like a heavy cloak. The day the stone was set in place, it was exactly two years prior that he went to the E.R.. with his chest hurting. Now here I stood in the cemetery and the sky could not have been more blue. I watched as the final touches on the stone were finished and the setting was complete. Then just as the company truck began to pull away, the most intense rain storm hit in a fraction of a second. There was lightening everywhere and the rain came down so hard. On the night of Glade's birthday, following the day he died, my 8 year old granddaughter watched the lightening. It was everywhere that night too. It surrounded us. She looked up and said, "Look, Grandpa is fishing in heaven. You can see his line whip across the sky." We have never forgotten that and I can't see lightening ever now and not think of him. Now here I was, his marker finally finished and it was like I was standing in the same place all over again. The dark clouds rolled in with the thunder and the lightening bolts whipped across the sky, and with that down pour of rain, I once again felt his intense emotion. I could feel his gratitude, mixed with his sorrow, it was soaking me through, hanging on me along with the warmth of his love. I know he misses us as much as we miss him. I know his frame of reference is different, I know he sees much differently than we do. I know he has the greater knowledge and a vastly different perspective than we do here, but I know his heart misses the physical interaction with us just as much as we miss him. I know it! I have pure knowledge of a spiritual realm I did not have before. There is life after this life!
I am grateful today that he has a monument befitting him personally. It’s beautiful just like his life was beautiful. My heart aches to see it finished though. It brought me comfort to work on it for him. Maybe that's why I never wanted to finish with it. A headstone represents finality. It is final. Death is final. I am so sad today. I feel so completely lost without him, continually wrestling with how to proceed forward without him. It will never set right with me, ever, no never! I cannot stop being sad. So I guess it's official . . . my grief is set in stone!
Rest in peace honey. I’ll see you in the morning, not too far off, I hope. The sun will rise and I will say goodbye to all this worldly heartache and there in the morning light, you’ll be. Oh the joy that day will bring. Until then, be with me always. I know you will! I love you SO much! I'll love you forever! Yes, Forever and Always!!! To the moon and back, around the universe and beyond, through time and throughout all eternity! You and me honey - Always you and me!
A LABOR OF LOVE from Faye Crowther on Vimeo.
