Sensitive to details

There are more connections than we may realize

You may recall that my 2026 “star word” is “sensitivity.” On a regular basis, especially when something unusual happens, or when I take time to absorb life’s details, I am surprised by the connections I see as I take time to look more deeply.

This morning, when selecting my shirt, I remembered the forecast (unseasonable, perhaps record-breaking warmth today, close to 70 degrees in some parts of the region) I decided on a solid blue short-sleeve shirt, only the second time since November I have not worn something with sleeves.

I took Otis outside, inhaling the frosty morning air, marveling at how little snow pack remains, reminding myself that by tomorrow morning it will be just bare brown grass. Within a short time I was back inside, Otis contentedly munching his morning kibble, I settling into my prayer chair in the sun room, which will not bear evidence of its name for another two hours. In these darkened months of winter I suppose I should call it the shadow room, but I digress.

I picked up my Liturgy of the Hours and my Bible and settled in, opening the book to see February 14th jump off the page into my mind. That’s right, it’s Valentine’s Day. I sighed, acknowledging that for the first time in three decades there was need to purchase flowers or a card or to make plans for a special evening meal. Claudia and I were not sentimentalists, so over the years our Valentine’s Day practice became more the intentional avoidance of restaurants or other locations packed with love-glazed couples. We spent the day or evening together, enjoying one another’s companionship, always knowing we had the option to do something else if we chose to, but we typically stuck to our quiet pattern. Being together was enough.

Sometimes that’s what grief looks like to me: the inability or non-necessity of choice. I no longer need to choose or discuss with another person what I might do, because I am widowed. I can do whatever I choose, but in itself that can be a rather desolate place to live, being able to choose, but not longer needing to.

As I finished my morning time of prayer and meditation, I laid aside the books from my lap, and still thinking of Valentine’s Day without a co-celebrator in my life now, I opened my iPad to begin this Substack article. Immediately, this picture appeared and caught my attention. (The pictures rotate every few seconds, so I probably couldn’t have found this on my own at precisely the right moment, even if I tried).

The tag on the picture said, “From Claudia.” I blinked in surprise and stepped into detail mode. I remembered the day very well. It was our last summer family gathering at a lake house in North-Central Minnesota, where most of our twelve children and their children had gathered for our time together. The boys with us are two of our most Minnesota-esque grandchildren with light complexions, blond hair and blue eyes, cute as can be. Claudia, looking better than she should after a major surgery to remove the cancer that had invaded her body, has a genuine smile on her face, mine a bit more subdued. Her top is one she wore for maximum comfort, so very familiar to me. The shirt I am wearing in the picture is the exact shirt I chose this very morning from my closet, the orange cover of my iPhone peeking out from my pocket today as it did that summer day eighteen months ago. It is almost as though Claudia offered me a gift this morning, as disparate details came together in a mere few seconds of culmination.

From observation of details, I slip into a time of remembrance. I ask myself “the questions,” perennial soul inquiries:

• Had I know it was our last summer family gathering together, would I have done anything different? (No, I tell myself, probably not).

• How much did Claudia know, intuitively, about the direction life was heading? (There were so many unusual happenings on that trip that signaled significant change: she caught herself crying on several occasions, which was never her way; she and I had many conversations about what life would look like in a few years; we conjectured together about why our house wouldn’t sell; we talked about her vocational future, which she was uncertain about; her mother was in the final stages of life, soon to die, so we had our last visits with her).

• If it were I to have died first, what would that have looked like for Claudia? How would she be observing Valentines Day this year if she were on her own?

• What does it mean to be alone at sixty-one after thirty years of a relationship-maxed life history, having raised twelve children to adulthood, and having spent three decades with a soul companion?

The questions are perennial ones because they don’t really have any answers. But as poet Rainer Maria Wilkie has guided so many times, instead of seeking answers, I do better to live the questions:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

The first Valentine’s Day without my closest friend will be a strange one, not because we ever went out of our way to celebrate it in our years together, but because we didn’t. It was most often a quiet time which we spent together.

Kind of like today, only different.