It’s going on nine years ago now that I sat me down under that old elm tree in the cool spring air and thought about things. 

I haven’t been back to that particular spot since then; the other day I made a trip out there.  I wasn’t sure if I remembered just where it was located as I got out of my truck, opened the gate, and started in the general direction of where I thought it was. 

For a bit, I figured I had it wrong.  But then I saw the tree I had sat under had grown more, and there were more gravestones than before.

My mind started going back over the past nine years, lingering the longest on what life had been and who I used to be when I had last visited this place. 

I looked back at myself then, a fellow used to a job with a steady paycheck who was trying to make a freelance business work with his two teenage boys. 

I remembered the hot disagreement I had witnessed between another man and his son as they worked on the same job we were on.  They switched from English to German when they caught on that I was listening, but I knew what they were saying anyway.  Anger is understandable in any language.

I thought of who my boys and my sweet daughter have become, and I think I can rightly say I’m proud of who they are, because I know they found themselves in spite of me.

Yes, I thought, things have changed.  The tree’s arms have reached down and wrapped their shelter more closely around the headstone beneath them; life has assumed a fuller, deeper meaning. 

But then my mind returned to that day, and even though it was fall now instead of spring, a cool breeze played through the leaves overhead just like back then. 

I didn’t expect a light brown Duramax to roll by towards the south, but neither would it have surprised me if one had.  Nor would it have surprised me if a like colored vehicle rolling by would have coasted to a stop and reversed back to where I stood, just like it had all those years ago. 

As my friend Jan uncoiled his lengthy frame from his truck back then, I thought of all the musings that had coursed through my mind during the day as I worked there.

We chatted, first of all, about his bird business and where he was going to deliver his pheasants the next week.  Seemed like it was Wyoming or Montana, if I remember right. 

Jan was interested in what I was doing, and I showed him what my task of the moment consisted of. 

But my mind wasn’t on what I was talking about.

After a bit, I changed the course of conversation.

“Jan,” I said, “I’ve been thinking about her a lot today.” 

“Yes,” he said, “Not a day goes by that I don’t.”

He filled me in on the details of his story, none of which I was acquainted with very well.  He told me he knew of Anne’s Severe Combined Immuno-deficiency Syndrome (SCIDS) and the implications of what a marriage to her consisted of.

He told me he had asked God for 5 years with her.  He told me God had given her to him for twice that, and how unworthy he felt to have been married to her. 

We talked about their son Zach.  I told him how that once, while driving by the school where he was teaching during his time of grief that I had wanted to stop in, but had lost my nerve, blaming my lack of confidence on the excuse that I didn’t want to interrupt his student’s study time.  He told me it wouldn’t have mattered, and I knew that really it wouldn’t have. 

We fell silent for a spell, and I asked him how he was doing with it all.  He said God had been good to him, and life was good.  I asked, “So you have found things to fill the vacancy in your heart?”

His answer from back then plays over in my mind every so often. 

“You know Les,” he said, “I found out early on that it was imprudent to try to fill the void left by Anne’s passing with other things.  In fact, I would much rather the vacancy stay just like it is for the rest of my life.  Why would I want to cover up all the good memories and times with something or someone else?  I want to keep that time of my life accessible to myself and anyone else who knew her.  If I covered that time in my life, then Zach would be forced to cover it also, and that wouldn’t be fair to him.” 

He paused a bit, and these two grown men wiped a few tears away. 

“No,” he said, “That place in my heart fits only Anne.  Nothing else will fit there, and I want to keep it that way as a memorial to her.  Doing so does not hinder or make my heart smaller in any way as I accept and give love and devotion to my wife Laura.  It rather enlarges it; my heart has had to grow in order to bring in new love and life.  It’s the hearts that try to fit something else into the rend made by loss that end up with a misfit, and a misshapen scarred up heart limited to time and place is the result.”

We should have had a prayer out there. 

We didn’t know it, but we were in church right then, gathered in one of God’s most beautiful sanctuaries, just the two of us.

And while it was Jan’s loss we were talking about, the One who made Jan and Anne, and me, had a message to get through to both of us that day. 

Somehow, even though I still felt that familiar tight lump in my throat the other day as I visited Anne’s grave, I found that it healed me. 

I like to think it was because I was allowed to be part of the journey.

Do you get it?

It healed me, not so much because I was mourning Anne’s death, but it healed me, nonetheless, of things I was carrying that day.

It healed me, because just like water and energy remain of the same quantity as the first day of creation, so the unselfishness of the one who I visited with back there reached up to today, being of the same quantity now, as it was then. 

Had his heart been rimmed up with scars, and closed off with self-pity and offense, he never would have seen me working there in the first place. 

Or, had his heart been crammed with other things as a filler, he may have seen me, stopped and we could have visited, but not freely; it would have been constrained to things that were valueless, things we both would have admitted were filler, even though we would have tried to fool ourselves into thinking they had value.

This isn’t so much the story of the two mentioned.  They wouldn’t want it that way.

It is the story, rather, of love and devotion given, and shared.

And when the fragments that remain are gathered, there is always more than enough left to help someone else along.