How Many Seconds in a Year?

Friends, Family and Countrymen:

A year.  That's what Valentine's Day signals for me now; another year.  It's more like New Years Day than a 'honey-bun' day.  Yet, in some ways it's still nice to be aware that couples are thinking deeply about the other, the soulmate, the wife, the hubby and doing something a little out of the ordinary or an oo-la-la-lot out of the ordinary.  To those of you supposedly in love who are passing up your daily or once a year chance to indulge yourselves in what it means to be "in love" go out and get yourself spanked, hard and long, you idiots.  If you're inclined to let bullshit get in the way of that little bit of time you get on this planet with someone at least remotely compatible with your needs and your offerings, I can only lower my head and want to kick dirt on your shoes for making such a bad call on a "fastball right down the pipe".

To those of you offering me so much time to walk along and console me I'm feeling loved and I've learned from you.  In this year, together, or with me out a wandering alone, time has been by biggest companion.  Lots of it.  A year after a death as personal as Lyn's was to me (more so to her of course) time's pace was as much of the pain as the achy-breaky heart syndrome I worked to overcome.  A year is a lot of seconds.  And I feel I counted each one as something remembered, felt or imagined coming into that moment and taunting me into considering it; wanted to or not.  I feel I lived that entire year more so than all the other 64 years of my, starting to smell like an old person, life.  Something about the "replacement" exercises of that aloneness I've written or talked to you about--that "object" word that is really a verb, "replacing".  It is where a "re-placing of time as it stands still beside and inside.  And it is immovable until it is a noun, "replacement".  Then you can hop over it or jump around whatever it is.  Mostly though I want to say thank you for being with me all year and continuing on if you can (I ought to be able to pay you back somehow in time).  I know, I just said it was so very long, but it's intensity taught me much about dealing with the time I have left. 

I must tell you I have no idea what the meaning of life or death is after this year.  It makes so sense to me either way.  What an outcome.  You head into grieving believing you're going to come out the other side (or not caring if you do or not) and once passing through you suspect your gain will be insight into the "Why Me?", "What is the point of it all", "Oh, I get it" questions all answered up and neatly packed into your backpack and ready for the next walk or stroll through Life's Park.  Nope.  Not a clue.  Clueless, is a better or best term I can come up with.  I think this outcome shortens my life in many ways.  It was so much fun ignoring the lack of aim of a life for 64 years that I actually just became "me" and learned about "others" and fa la la la la, la la la laa'd into the comma my brain wants me to be in.  It's like the Kroll's Cafe commercials in Fargo where two German crones come on TV to tell about their cafe, those silver bullet diners and their catch phrase is, "Shut up and Eat?".  Damn!!  That's about it for me now.  A year digging into the soul of my soul and I come out completely uncertain about almost everything I felt some certainty toward before.  You know like "truth".  Pretty stable idea in life for most, but "truth" is on a string and it swings like an old hanging bridge over an ancient forest's river artery.  What a great invention our brains.  And to head into today and beyond realizing it's best advice and clearest message is going to be, "Shut up and eat!"  It's enough I'm sure, to send many folks off looking for the answer in a bible or from the flapping jaws of da preacher man. 

I'm different without her.  Also, my mom and dad, David's wife Jane, Lyn's brother Lewis, all dying during that time Lyn and I spent walking around her death messenger on the farm have affected my psyche in the sense that I hardly realized they were dying right before my very eyes, while all the time I could only see Lyn and be steady to aid her if she ever called out.  Those almost seven years of tending to her cancer beast and her needs took her away from me one day at a time until she reached a point about five years in where we started to become separate in our thoughts and deeds of living as farmers.  She made time then, once my parents were secured in their vaults in hallowed ground, Jane too, to think about her life and her kids and their kids and our time together as the package of her life.  It absorbed her somewhat more than I expected.  I had imagined that there would be great chats about "life" and the "pursuit of happiness", but that was not Lyn's style.  "Let it be" was Lyn's style and she worked at farming while her mind worked at letting go of her ailing body, that cancer that was chewing on her like a dog trying to chew up an entire elk carcass alongside the highway.  We didn't grow apart, really.  We didn't fall out of love.  Intimacy was pretty damn sweet.  But, she was leaving me way back when and I was walking a thin line of life without her back as far back as 2011, just after dad died, as if she had met her last obligation to the family that adopted her unconditionally.  It's a torture I will not recommend, but I know so many others have lived it and know more about its feel and effect than I can describe in these paragraphs.  Some others in my family, like Carol, lost husband and child in one fell swoop of the grim reapers sickle and my feelings are real for that, but distracted as I worked with Lyn to enjoy every last moment of her last wish to nurture a little farm and all it's living things.  That's who she was all her life, Nature's handmaid.

I wrote a poem last night thinking of Lyn and its what it is and will probably find this post tomorrow as I look at it again today and remember what it is the poem was trying to say.  Why it seemed to have to come out and get some fresh air.  You know, what poems tend to do; show up, mostly not to be read by many or even a few, but just to be out in the light for their time.  Like the lives we live; just a little sunshine goes a long way in a life.  I think that is all I have to say for now about this right of passage I'd gladly take out of life's formula if I were in charge.  And, I'd also try to leave more bread crumbs along the pathways of my fellow beasts so the pointlessness of it all; life and death, would not have to be so painful.

Why?