Missing Bern

Bern is in southern West Virginia, staying in Princeton, where my parents moved when I went to college. I had a room I slept in in the Princeton house, but it wasn't MY Room in any real way.


Today they went across either Peel Chestnut Mountain or Keystone Mountain (probably the latter) to Uncle Frankie's funeral in Our Lady of Victory RC church in Gary. It's where Bern and I were married in one of the shortest wedding services in human history. The priest didn't know quite what to make of one of his good Catholic girls marrying an Episcopalian who was a student at Harvard Divinity School. So, it was quick.

I think there was snow in the mountains today, so re-crossing them in the funeral procession to Bluewell, where I believe Frankie will be buried, might have been iffy. I haven't heard from Bern yet today so I don't know.

She's only been gone since early Saturday morning and it's 6 p.m. on Monday and I am astonished that I miss she so much.

We're old married people (44 years in September) and often we'll spend the whole day without being in the same room for more than a few minutes until dinner. And I never realized just knowing she was in the house had such a soothing and comforting effect on me. Usually, when we're apart for a few days, it's me that's gone to lead a workshop somewhere so I know, since I'm in NYC or Ireland or somewhere at a retreat center, that she's not around. But with her gone, a rarer occurrence, though her women's group does go on a weekend retreat every year or so, the house seems empty.

Also, I have to take the Puli to the Canal for his long walk. I take him for a walk when the two of us get up (Puli and Man) usually after Bern, and I take him for 'the little walk' around 4:30 every afternoon and a very short walk before going to bed. But every day but Monday, Bern takes him  on the Canal walk along the old C&O Farmington Canal that has been turned into a 6 mile horizontal park from Cheshire through Hamden to New Haven. On Mondays I take him because she's writing checks for our bills. (Imagine, we still write checks--or Bern does--I haven't written more than three checks a year for 20 years....)

What is it about this woman, I ponder, that makes her physical presence in the house, make me feel so much better than I've felt the last two days and nights?

Why do I long to hear her puttering around downstairs while I type this?

Maybe it's just habit. Or, more probably, it's just love.

Maybe absence does, after all, make the heart grow fonder. (The cynical form of that is "absence makes the heart go wander"....)

But I'm not a cynic. Sardonic and Ironic certainly, perhaps too much so, but not cynical. I just love the girl, that's what this emptiness is about....