Rachel Bostwick

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.

Do you want me to comfort you? Open your Bible.

I rolled over in bed and groaned. “NO. Ugh, fine, but it better be right there. Like, I’m going to open the Bible app and the verse of the day better be God shall wipe every tear from their eye. I’m not digging for it and then pretending it was You.”

Just open it.

I spent 22 exhausting, horrific days in the hospital at Lee’s bedside. Just tiring and inconvenient at first, but as he slowly got sicker and sicker, the days began to be punctuated by actual terror. All summer I used to wake up every day and check on the status of his disease. I’d look over his latest bloodwork, take stock of his current symptoms, and run them all through the calculators that gave him an approximate prognosis. All summer, his numbers were stable. 3% chance of death in the next three months. 20% estimated mortality in the event of surgery. Stable.

The stomach pain started sporadically at first. Gallbladder, I was sure, but Lee didn’t agree, and when we went to the emergency room once, twice, the doctors just called it heartburn and sent us home with double strength antacids. It made sense. Liver disease had caused water to accumulate on his body everywhere. He’d been telling doctors for years that he never shed enough water, and they all laughed at him. The fat man who thought he was retaining water. No one was laughing now. The water pressed on all his organs, wore him down, sapped his strength. Made sense that it would cause him extreme heartburn, too.

He decided to deal with the pain. Sometimes he’d get up in the middle of the night and sit on the couch. I couldn’t help him so I’d sleep at the end of the bed with my head closer to his place on the couch. He liked that, he never liked to feel alone.

At the hospital, those numbers began to climb. Like a rollercoaster. Interesting at first, almost exciting. But like a rollercoaster, knowing that you are safe. A little swoop and things go back to normal. It was his gallbladder after all. He needed surgery but by then he was too sick for a full procedure. They did a bridge procedure instead, just a little tube to drain the gallbladder and try to take some of the pressure off his system, but that made him sicker, too. When his kidneys started to fail I stopped checking the numbers and started praying out loud for a miracle.

On one of the last days that Lee could still hold a good conversation he caught me crying. He’d spent hours two days before talking with the pastor of our family’s church and it had lit him up. “Hey,” he said, “I want you to pray with me. I want you to help me talk to God.”

He wanted to talk to God. In the last twenty years, it had always been “your God.”

“Let’s do it now,” I said.

We held hands, both hands, folded on his hospital table. I prayed the sinner’s prayer, simple and honest, but Lee elaborated on it, as he would, of course, made it his own. Not a rote prayer, but a sincere cry out to the only One that is still there when all the trappings fall away. The only One that would be able follow him when he finally had to walk somewhere I wasn’t allowed to go, too. In the middle of our prayer, a nurse tried to pop in, and I tried to slip my hands out of his, but Lee held them firmer and shook his head at the nurse. “Come back in five minutes.” We prayed longer.

The next night he was tired and in pain. I had no way of knowing it would be one of the last nights he could say anything more than “I love you.” Even as the days progressed and he got sicker and more tired, I couldn’t really see it. Today was a bad day, I’d tell myself. Tomorrow will be better. The next morning we’d have a few sentences of good conversation, then pain would take over again. But that particular night, he was able to talk to me. Still in pain, but able to talk.

“Can I, uh, read you something from the Bible?” I asked. “Just something that I was thinking might be helpful for you.”

“Sure,” he said. “Read it to me in the King James, that’s the one I grew up with.”

I pulled open the app and found the verses I’d been looking for earlier. Philippians 4. One of the most encouraging chapters in the Bible. I started in verse 4, continued through 7, the one I really wanted to share with him, the one I’d gone digging for. “And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” I kept going and stopped after 8, continuing through that famous litany of how to guard our thoughts. It goes like this: Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.

I stopped there, right after 8. That was enough. I didn’t want him to get overwhelmed.

He smiled slowly. “That’s really good. I like the part about the peace of God. Read it to me again, but in a simple version after all. Remember I am new to this.”

I read it all again slowly, from the NLT. He smiled and nodded. “Thanks, Rach.”

It wasn’t the last good night, but one of them.

I don’t think I want to think too hard about the nights after that – not at all about the last one of all. One trick I’ve learned, just this summer in fact, for dealing with my anxiety is that if I don’t stop at the time and intensely record the details of an event that causes me pain or fear, the event is much more easily dusted over by the soft snow of the passage of time. But I will say this: my husband was in pain, there is no way to pretend he wasn’t. He endured it because he wanted to fight to continue in this world. His body lost the battle, his soul never did. Even in the worst of the pain, he was kind, so kind to the people that were trying to help him. He always advocated for himself, but never rudely. He always said please and thank you. Even there, not just a simple please or thank you, but gratitude with an explanation for why their help was so valuable and what made their specific help good for him. He made friends with his doctors and nurses and janitors. He knew how many kids they had and what their country of origin was like.

This morning I woke up slowly. Last night had been so painful. Trick or treating without Lee is wrong. The beautiful night air was poison in my lungs. I ate half a peppermint patty from Julius and the tiny Butterfinger Breyen slipped me. Nothing else. I kept seeing his silhouette out of the corner of my eye, coming out the door to collect the Dad Candy tax and make fun of all the kids costumes. The holidays were when he was happiest. Saddest, too, sometimes. Somehow he wanted more from them than they were ever really ever to give him. Every year he would plan something more elaborate than the year before, trying to reach some perfect level of joy. Better food, more festive music. Draw more friends and family into his celebrations.

Doing any of that without him, it feels so wrong.

Do you want me to comfort you?

I opened the Bible app alone in my bed. I squinted at the screen. I can’t read the screen without my glasses anymore so I held it away from my face.

Verse of the day: Philippians 4:9. The verse I had stopped just short of reading to Lee. The closing, really, of that particular passage:

Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.

I read Philippians 4 to Lee because I wanted him to have God’s peace during his storm. I didn’t know I had saved a little for myself. I got out of bed ready to face another painful day.

 When I was a kid, one of my favorite toys, and one that I have some of the fondest memories of, was my Viewmaster. We had a few sets of reels and a nice textured plastic carrying case they all fit into. My favorite set was The Fox and the Hound. I’m pretty sure I never saw the movie. But the setting of the reels was these beautiful forest scenes. The story, to me, was peripheral to being able to peer into the viewer and get lost in these beautiful almost real places. The Fox and the Hound set was painted pictures over three dimensional scenes. They must have been models. I can remember clearly the texture and the depth without being able to remember much else. I know that I would stare into them and imagine myself SOMEPLACE ELSE. I was transported.

This seems to be a common thread over the course of my life. Is it common to everyone, or is it one of my special qualities? Does everybody want to get lost in somewhere mysterious? Somewhere far away but very close, somewhere just beyond the veil of reality?

Another question I have about this… is it a longing for heaven or is it a pull toward hell? When I was a teenager almost grown I flirted briefly with the idea of becoming a missionary. I had no good plan for my life, and there was this place that would teach you, train you, and send you. That sounded pretty good to me. They were fundamentalists. King James Version only. Skirt wearers. I wasn’t daunted by that, though. What changed my mind was the beginnings of the Internet. There were all these people out there pretending together. Specifically, there were people out there creating dragon personas and playing to be them with each other. Just having fun in a mysterious pseudo-place as made up characters. I wanted to be a part of that more than I wanted to be a missionary. That felt, and still feels a little like a failing. Looking back at that organization now, the thought of me doing something like that at that age gives me chills, and not in a good way. I don’t believe I was meant to become that kind of fundamentalist. But still, the fact that imaginary games led me away from what I thought could be a calling pauses me.  On the other hand, it wasn’t a real calling, right? If I was really supposed to travel to the jungle and pass out leaflets, something so trivial wouldn’t have lured me away. I wasn’t meant to do that. I mean in a way, maybe I was spared by this. Maybe that would have been a horrible life. Maybe I would have grown up full of hatred and judginess. Maybe my love of imagination spared me from a life of unhappiness.

Parenthetically, I converted from nondenominational Protestantism to Catholicism in my late twenties. I may have been trying to convert Catholics to Protestantism if I had gone down that path. A lot of missionaries do. I have no desire to look up the place I had considered going with and see what they are up to these days. It feels too much like a brush with death and, on the other hand, too much like trying to look down the path I didn’t travel.

When I was a teenager, the very same teenager, I was so enamored of the idea of virtual reality that I read an entire non-fiction books,, purchased with my own money, about what it could be like in the future. Okay that doesn’t sound as impressive as it did in my head. But it was definitely something that enchanted me. I read fiction books about it, too. To this day one of my most favorite series is Otherland, an epic 5000 page saga spread across four volumes about a merry little band of adventurers who have to cross from one VR world to another and another to try and save the world and the people they love. I love how it bends reality. I love encountering creatures that may be real or may be artificially intelligent. I love pondering what the difference is.

• 

• 

For Christmas this year I bought my sons a Playstation VR headset. It came with two games and there are many more on the store. The Playstation VR is a middle of the line VR device. The resolution isn’t as good as playing Oculus Rift on the PC but it’s nothing like sticking your phone in a modern Viewmaster, either. First we played a game that is like a rhythm-runner set on the cover of a 1980s space metal album. You press the buttons at the right time to avoid obstacles and destroy squiggly demons. It feels like a roller coaster and it’s wonderful. I swear my mouth was hanging open the whole time. It was a rush, a good rush. Lovely. 

Then I played the game that came with the set I bought for them. It’s called Moss and it’s about this delicate little mouse who is joined by an overseeing spirit (yourself, Player One) in a quest to save the world. What was wonderful about this game is that when I twist my head around I can see around and behind things. I don’t know if anyone who hasn’t been a gamer for awhile can appreciate what that means. For decades we’ve all been craning our heads to get around obstacles due to poorly designed camera angles. Never before has the game actually responded.

But that’s not the only thing that strikes me about the game. It’s so beautiful that I just want to sit in it. I sit in my chair with the goggles on and suddenly I’m in an ancient temple for brave mice. The light filters in beautifully. If I take the goggles off I can still see the scene on the screen, but it’s flat. It’s pretty, but it’s flat. I put the goggles back on and the light is vivid, twisting. I’m there. I want to stay there. My grandchildren, ojala, will laugh at this level of tech. But for me it’s transporting. It’s magic of the most delightful kind. 

Along the same lines of this love for VR is my love for role-playing games. I’ve started playing them with my kids in the past few years. Mom as the gamemaster, the kids as kids having adventures in another time and another place. It’s fun. It takes us someplace else. It makes us like each other more. That’s a good thing, I think. I’ll write about that more another time.

With any of the games I indulge in, I only play for a little. There is laundry to fold and there are children to care for. I did become a missionary in my own way. I have four children of my own who need evangelized every day. I don’t wear skirts unless they are emblazoned with the symbols of the Hufflepuff house or the stained glass from Beauty and the Beast and I never try to convert anyone to my religion, at least, not on purpose. But my daily job is trying to show my family the love of God in whatever concrete ways I can. For now, the taste of the mysterious unknown fits in there. Whether it was ever supposed to be, whether this is something calling me homeward or away, I still do not know.