40 Things I Admire About Lee, on What Would Have Been his 40th Birthday

Dear Lee,

I miss you very much. So do your children, your grandmother, your mother, your siblings, my siblings. All of us really. Having gained a little space from the blistering heat of the trial by fire that was your last hospital stay, I have now had a lot of time to think more peacefully about the things I miss about you. When we were still together, it was harder to see sometimes. Caught up in everyday life, I couldn’t always see the good things about you. We bickered so much. I’m sorry about that, and so grateful for the fact that you stayed no matter what. I know you felt the same way.

You always made fun of me for being so much older than you – 16 whole months, wow. But long enough that I turned 30 well before you, and then 40.

And then you had the nerve to die before you turned 40 yourself. I’ll forever be aging while you never managed to catch up. So rude. I can hear you making fun of me from here.

We’re doing okay. I’m doing the best I can. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like enough. I take your kids to the movies, even to the drive-in, and to Hersheypark. I go to everything I can at church, thinking every time of how you were determined to get involved when you got better. I’m struggling with things like finances, taxes, car maintenance, school paperwork. I did buy a nice, safe car for me and the kids to get around in. I’m having to learn how to self-regulate and realizing how unfair I was to you, sometimes, second-guessing the hard choices you had to make.

But here we are, on your birthday. I can’t remember if I did your birthdays right. I think I made food you would like and tried to do fun things with you. Sometimes I got you presents but more often than not, that didn’t seem to mean much to you. The only thing you really wanted from us was respect and time. Well we ran out of time, but it’s still your birthday, and I’d like to take a minute to share some of the things that I admired and respected about you. I hope it gets to you.

1. Your generosity to strangers. Even though we never had enough, you always wanted to be able to help the poor or extended family.

2. Your generosity to your kids. You always spilled out more than we could afford to lavish them with gifts and experiences.

3. Your generosity with me. Same as with the kids, you would have done anything to be able to spoil me with a gift. And you always knew the right ones to get.

4. Your level-headed, mostly unbiased approach to politics.

5. Your keen mind for remembering sports scores – utterly foreign to me, but remarkable. I always said you missed your calling as a baseball announcer. You would have been so interesting as one.

6. Your interest in meeting strangers and foreigners. You knew it embarrassed me when you asked people where they were from, but your spirit about it was so kind and humble that I can’t help admiring it. You’d say “she doesn’t like it when I ask this, but-” And soon you’d be engaged in an animated discussion about food, travel, immigration, and world soccer.

7. You always called me “she” because everyone knew exactly who you meant. I was your only woman. From the time we started dating and all the girly posters in your teenaged bedroom disappeared overnight, you never once made me feel like a second place or a second choice. I was your first choice for everything.

8. Your humor. You made me roll my eyes or glare more often than I could have ever counted, but you made so many people laugh.

9. Your legendary video game prowess. FYI: Jules inherited your Diablo account and used all your prestige points to make his character twice as fast as mine and never stops lording it over me.

10. The fact that you wanted to spend time with the kids above all else.

11. That thing where you stood up for kids who were bullied or picked on in school. That’s probably why I married you. You were always willing to be a champion for the oppressed.

12. You never cared about being cool or not being cool. You were yourself, take it or leave it.

13. Your passion for music

14. Your interest in new technology (Now I’m just naming stuff we had in common)

15. Your laugh

16. Your voice

17. The way you looked in a hawaiian shirt and goofy hat

18. Your endless thirst for knowledge

19. Your epic beard

20. Your kindness to underpaid workers of all kinds

21. Your generous tipping habits

22. Your encyclopedic knowledge of history – I don’t think I ever saw someone engage you in a conversation about history where you weren’t able to keep up and provide interesting details to the conversation

23. Your devotion to your grandmother

24. Your love for all of your nieces and nephews

25. Oh. All those times you had to crawl under the trailer to fix our toilet

26. Your ability to fix something by just thinking about it and making it work. I will never forget the time you needed a part for the toilet and you went to the hardware store, bought four different pieces, came home and fit them together, and they just worked.

27. Your nice eyes.

28. Your love of adventure. My favorite parts of our time together were our trips to Philly, DC, and New York. Those were the very best days. On those days for a few hours we got to be kids in school again, trials of real life forgotten. We learned together, explored new places, and remembered why we liked each other.

29. That thing where you’d play DJ, in the car, or on the TV, or in the yard on a box radio hooked up to your phone. It drove me nuts. You always played it way too loud. We all miss it now.

30. Your ability to admit when you were wrong.

31. That you never lost your desire to play.

32. That you never lost your sense of wonder, especially when it came to history, science, and the Unknown.

33. Your gentle, deep humility when you realized it was almost time to go. Though you knew you hadn’t found time to get all the answers straight, you still shoved pride aside and submitted quietly to God, asking Him to keep you safe as you had to leave us.

34. All those visits and phone calls you made in the hospital to tell the important people how much you loved them – and the ones you wanted to make but ran out of strength.

35. How you treated your hospital room like your own personal court, entertaining visitors, with such grace, humor, and good will.

36. That you never, ever got bitter about having to leave. You never really believed you were going to die, but you were never angry about it, either. How many could say the same?

37. The sweet, loving, romantic things we talked about when we knew it might be the end. I have most of them written down. I keep them, and my galaxy rose, and the zox bracelets you bought me, nearby so I always remember that you would have gone on loving me even if you had another forty years to do it.

38. That you apologized for all our mistakes in our twenty-one years together, but flat out refused to even entertain an apology from me. You shut it down when I tried to start one. “I need you to be strong,” you’d said. “So you can take care of me and the kids. I need you to be whole.”

39. That you never let go of me, no matter how hard it got. And we both know how hard it was.

40. “I love you, be careful, be safe.” Every single time we parted. Every day. Every phone call. Every trip.

I love you, too, Chief. I hope you and Pap are up there celebrating your birthday with fishing and a baseball game. See you soon.