Rather belated, but it's something I've really had a hard time getting past...
For those of you who don't know, my birthday is February 22nd. This past birthday, 2008, my 39th, I get a call from Erika... Renee had just passed away. Morbidly ironic that our souls became one on her birthday, in 1994, and she would die on mine, thirteen and a half years later.
Yeah...
My desktop is down at the moment (fried motherboard this time) and I don't have many scanned photos of Renee, but this is a photo of her taken about a year before we first met (knowingly, anyways).
Sigh... Imagine more than a decade of those beautiful brown eyes gazing at you with the sort of love normally reserved for fairy-tales...
We spent most of our first date, July 10th, 1994, finishing each other's sentences and saying the exact same things at the exact same times. Took all of fifteen minutes for us to realize that we were absolutely perfect for each other. And her two daughters, Erika (8) and Ruby (4) took a shine to me almost as fast.
Initially, we lived about 130 miles apart but, after that first date, I called in almost every last favor anybody owed me to move from Amarillo to Lubbock to be with her. Of course, being not only a minister's daughter (twice over), but a minister herself, as well as my own father being a minister, there were more than a few eyebrows raised. But after a few minutes of seeing us together, even the Pastor of her church (her adoptive father since her biological father died several years prior) couldn't deny how much we belonged together.
We had our ceremony on her birthday; I teased that I only had one date to remember (for both birthday and anniversary) and she made a point that I would be in exponential trouble if I forgot. A beautiful late-summer day, our ceremony was at the arboretum of one of the local parks and it almost seemed as if the flowers bloomed particularly full, just for us.
Of course, no relationship is without it's bumpy spots, and ours seemed to be front-loaded. Barely an hour's drive towards our honeymoon and the transmission of her car goes out. So, how do we spend the first night of our lives together? Sitting in a truck stop in our wedding outfits playing Magic: The Gathering (one of my college friends gave us two crates of boosters as a wedding gift). Frustrating at the time (for obvious reasons), though we both had a hard time not laughing anytime we'd encounter M:tG; the cards or in conversation.
A few years in, Renee had a hard bout with diabetes. Since she and the girls had their CDIB cards (certifying Native American ancestry), we wound up moving to a small town in Oklahoma where she could receive free medical care (those test strips alone cost a fortune). Needless to say that, despite my then-career as a truck driver, word circulated about the lesbian couple with school-age children. Got an unwelcome visit from Child Protective Services who, in their 'infinite wisdom', felt that we were not providing 'a mentally and emotionally sound home environment' for our girls.
Yeah, right... More than a decade as a family and I could count the number of times Renee or I raised our voices OR physically disciplined either of the girls on one hand. I considered us to be excellent parents. How many can claim to have teenaged daughters with enough moral character that you could let them take off on their own with over $1000 cash in their pockets (to pay bills and such) and not have to worry about a single cent going anywhere other than it should?
At any rate, they threatened to take the girls from us unless we separated, and we didn't have the means to finance a legal battle over the issue. Plus, after some of the stuff I'd gone through about their ages, I couldn't let the girls have to go through that sort of crap. Considered a full-scale move to somewhere far less anal than Oklahoma, but that would have completely wiped out our savings as well as left us with no way to cover Renee's diabetic supplies.
So, I agreed to move out, staying with some of my online friends in the interim. Yeah, probably not the smartest of ideas, but they were turning the screws from day one and really didn't give us much in the way of time or options. Of course, our separation was only intended to last until Ruby (our youngest) turned 18, at which point CPS could go fuck themselves.
For the benefit of those who don't want to bother scrolling back through this mess with calculator in hand, we would have been reunited today. Yeah... Might explain why this has been on my mind like a jackhammer all day today, starting even before I woke up this morning.
To steal one of my grandfather's oft-used adages, "The question is: Where do we go from here?"
I really don't have the slightest clue. Been doing a massive buttload of reading lately, with mixed results; it's a distraction, yes, but a distraction I never had until she introduced me to my now-favorite authors. I try to focus on my writing but, again, this is something she got me into. Music's hardly any help, either; we were both avid 80's fans and very few songs I care to listen to didn't somehow acquire special meaning for the two of us.
Erika's married with four kids of her own... Ruby's engaged... They've both built lives over the past several years without me in them...
So...
Where do I go from here?
On the advice of Jakkal (@ Black Tapestries), I'm putting some of my artwork here as a bit of a journal. As the above image shows (all six drawings supposedly the same character), I've got some major work to do in maintaining consistency. Hopefully, it won't be too horribly long before I can rework the above page sufficiently to where I'd actually be proud to show it off.
