I stand here in the second row of our little country church looking at the gray steet casket heaped with beautiful flowers and my eyes are dry...

I cried when I saw my husband paralyzed by his first stroke when only his eyes could move, and the terror in them showed his horror at being entombed in uncooperative flesh.
I cried in the months he spent struggling to learn to walk and talk again and found profanity the all purpose language easiest to communicate.
I cried when his arthritic knees worn by 35 years of bending, stooping, and lifting in an industrial plant hurt him so much he could hardly walk.
I hid my tears when the man who could repair anything but a broken heart took a simple blender apart down to the smallest elements to fix a twisted belt, then realized he was too tired to put it back together again (as if anyone could by then).
I cried when he got lost coming home from Clanton and wandered 14 hours through Selma and Montgomery before finding his way home to Tuscaloosa, and Romulus and to me.
I cried when grown men remembering his strength turned their faces away from him.
I cried the Saturday he reached for his coffee cup and missed by 15 inches and we looked in each others’ eyes and knew he’d had another stroke.
I cried when the doctors agreed he probably would not live through the night and I begged the Lord to leave him just a little longer.
I cried when I knew he’d had a heart attack 24 hours before the lab confirmed it.
I cried that Thanksgiving evening when he hurt so bad we went to the emergency room and the MRI found a 4 centimeter aneurysm behind his belly and the prognosis was three to six months.
I cried two years later when the CAT scan said the aneurysm was 6 centimeters and you could watch it pulse in his belly from 20 feet away.
I cried when he sat in his old blue recliner in the house where we had lived for 30 years and begged to go home.
I cried the times he got lost in our own home and a three year old grandson helped him find his way.
I cried when he called “Dorothy “ 100 times an hour and did not recognise me when I answered.
I cried when he called me Mama and meant his mama.
I cried when he asked me who I was and I said “Dorothy”, and he said, ” I was married to Dorothy, but she was young and pretty.”
　
I cried when he lost all sight except the sliver of light you might glimpse between fingers standing tight together in front of your face.
I cried when I walked out of Walmart and found a circle of strangers where he had climbed out of the car and fallen in the parking lot with a broken hip.
I cried when he lay blind and crippled and confused and held on to my hand and smiled when he heard my voice.
I cried when the swallowing that had become so difficult stopped, and his food became formula I pumped through a tube into his stomach.
I cried when he begged for a drink of cold water and a few swallows would have drowned him..
I cried when I took him to the hospital because we both knew he was dying and I could no longer care for all his needs.
I cried when the doctors said advanced Parkinson’s Disease and no one had told us so we might treat it.
I cried in the hundreds of hours by his bed just talking so he could find peace in the sound of a familiar voice.
I cried the day while bathing him I noticed that his brown calloused hand that could fix anything but a broken heart had become soft and pink and smooth like an infant‘s.
I cried when his family gathered around his hospital bed and told him goodbye and how much they loved him and honored him and would miss him and the nurses came in and told us to go home and scolded us for overreacting,
but we knew and he knew....
I cried when his labored breathing stopped and his loved ones watched the pulse in the hollow of his throat slow to a stop as we each gently touched him and told him “Godspeed”.
In front of his grey steel coffin with the flowers there is a picture of him taken when his face was filled with pride and joy and love of life on his grandson’s wedding day .
His glasses rest half opened on his worn bible reminding, ”I once was blind...”
And I know sees us from a loftier post.
No longer bound by time and space, years and pounds, and serial numbers,
his existance is light, and beauty and life unfathomable to our human eyes.
Though my eyes are damp, my head is high in pride in the life my husband lived so well and joy that he is face to face with our Lord.
There is peace in knowing we shared life from its heights to the depth and there is hope when I regard the fine young people he fathered and know the world is a better place because he taught four generations about living.
Our children stand straight and true, solid reminders that a man passed this way and in his humble way loved and laughed and cried and-- sometimes cursed-.
and left a precious legacy to those touched by his presence.
I’m not crying anymore..
Besides, he never liked to see me cry.