First let me thank those of you who have written to ask why I have been so silent on the blog, without any reason. There is no easy way to say this and it has taken me until now to even be able to write this: my darling Ruth died in August. Her death was unexpected and overwhelming. This was not the way we had thought about our end—I think we both had expected I would go first, not her. At least that is the way my imagination worked. Perhaps I thought that because life without her was and is unimaginable. I go to sleep at night and sometimes, in bed, as the first light is filling the room, I can almost imagine she is still alive and all that has happened was a bad dream. And then I know this is not true and I still have to get up. I am dead too.

We had gone to Seattle just for an unplanned trip, just one of those random things we had dreamed of doing in retirement when the weather was too hot and the road and the dogs were asking to go somewhere, anywhere. Ruthie seemed fine, full of restless energy as we closed up the house and threw some extra coolers in the back of the Subaru. The trip all seemed very spur of the moment and exciting, as if we were skipping school and not telling our parents.

The trip up was relaxing and I remember thinking that it should always be like this, picking places to stay on a whim; making sandwiches on the hot hood of a car from ingredients bought in a small town grocery as our smarter dogs lounge in the shade nearby; scrubbing bug corpses off a windshield; trying to learn Italian off of a CD and laughing at Ruth’s bad accent; realizing that comfortable beds are highly underrated; drinking wine from a plastic cup in a motel… God, it was grand.

Seattle in the summer is lovely too, but we weren’t enjoying it as much as we could have. At first we thought Ruth had developed a summer cold. She had an upset stomach and heartburn soon after we arrived. She was tired just walking around when she shouldn’t have been. She took some aspirin and that seemed to help, but she was still dizzy and out of sorts. I remember she told me her back hurt. We thought it was the flu. A godforsaken virus. We didn’t even go to the doctor.

Theresa Ruth, my Ruthie, died of a heart attack on July 20, 2015. She was 68 years old, but she never seemed a day older than 18 to me. This is so hard. She’s from Franklin Wisconsin and we buried her back there with her parents. I used to love it there, but I don’t think I’ll ever go back.

I’ve sold the house here in Antioch. My son had moved his family to Belize years ago and now I am going too. The dogs have their import permit, the movers come on Monday. Everything is going into a shipping container. Johnny has convinced me not to just do an estate sale and empty the house to start over, but I really want to. Maybe I’ll just keep it all in storage there. Moving to Belize was something Ruth and I talked about doing, but even so I can’t get over the feeling that I am running away from her—that I should stay here in case she comes back. The absence, the permanence of this all still shocks. I cannot see how this will ever become commonplace; it hurts all over.

So this is my last blog entry. I can’t imagine writing anything about church finances at this point. Even this post has taken two days to get down. I’m tired in the way that does not seem to allow ever being fully awake again. If it weren’t for the prospect of seeing my grandson I’m not even sure I’d leave this house let alone leave the country. Food tastes bad and the world seems flat and gray. But I am alive and it seems I will go on being so for awhile. Maybe someday this will make sense. I will wait and hopefully see why I am still here.

Good bye and thank you for reading.