We’re making a very difficult passage.
Its been a little more than a week since Anita passed away and we’re just wrecked.
Anita and I were together for about thirty years almost exactly as it turned out.
We were to celebrate our 27th anniversary this year. I proposed to her in bed actually. It was February of ’84, just before I moved down here to Austin to take this job I found. It was a good job and I liked Austin.
We were living in Dallas. We met in Dallas. I wrote a song about it, and from time to time I used to sing it to her. I wrote a couple of songs for her. Its a funny life when your reality sounds like a country song: “Then one day in Dallas I met a young woman with love in her eyes and stars in her hair. I’ll never forget what I felt when I saw her, what I said to myself when we met way down there.” We had a house there together before we were married. And everything about that little exercise was wrong except for Anita and me I guess.
I moved down to Austin, and she stayed behind and finished out the school year at DISD. We sold the house, and she came down and joined me in this crappy little duplex I had found not far from my new office. We were married in July of that year and we went and bought a house, a little nest, that fall, and started a family not long after.
And you know, though it rained on us a lot, life shit on us a lot, but you know we were very happy together. We were good for each other and I’m gonna miss her a lot.
But I feel now like a window opened in my life, or a door opened and then it closed again and in a way, I’m sort of back where I started. I don’t regret a thing, you know we lived life all the way. I don’t think I left any business unfinished. We both left it all out there. But I feel kind of funny. Like a loose wheel in the world, not connected to anything. Wobbly, like a wheel without an axle.
I feel like a worry has been lifted off my shoulders actually but replaced by something else, an even heavier weight.
Like a door opening she brought light into my life. She was a really social person. A fun person. And when the door closed it left me here in the dark.
Now that she’s gone I’m kind of lost.
We had that kind of relationship. We defined ourselves in terms of one another.
I called her “beautiful princess” and she called me her “prince charming.” Her “knight in shining armor.” Her savior. She said that I had literally saved her life on more than one occasion. And the devotion and the love that goes with that is something that is impossible to describe.
And it made me so proud when she talked like that and it kind of validated me, you know?
“Whatever else is wrong with me,” I thought, “that is one thing that is right.”
And toward the end, we tried to be strong for each other and focus on the diminishing strands of hope, and once I burst out crying, “Baby, please don’t leave me here alone!”
And she consoled me and said she wouldn’t and we held each other and she rubbed my head and said “Shh. I’m still here.” She thought she was going to get better, that we’d have one more round, one more year, right up to the very end.
But this was one thing I couldn’t fix for her, I couldn’t save her from.
And so now all that’s in the past. And I’ll never be the same. I sit alone out by the garden as the sun goes down, and I talk to her, and I cry.
Oh, God, why did you take her from me?