Haiku #34

Wild flowers blooming.

Cadbury eggs are on sale.

Spring two is now near.

A Surprise

Several people sent Irene plants and flowers when she was home on hospice.  There was one mum and several bulbs, tulips and daffodils.  I planted the mum and bulbs in the two terraces Irene built beneath the fig tree after she died.  It was the Irene Memorial Flower Bed.

Nothing happened the spring of 2011, and I figured I had planted them too late and everything had died.

I can see the fig tree from the kitchen sink window, and one day last week I noticed green where there was none before.  I went out and took a look, and to my surprise the bulbs had poked new leaves up through the ground!  I will have to watch to see if the mum made it too!

Haiku #33

Sunday we sang, "He

will raise you up on eagle's

wings", and I saw you.

The Last First

Today is the last first - the first anniversary of Irene’s death and the beginning of year two.  Looking back, it is hard to realize that a year has passed.  It seemed appropriate to mark the end of the first year by interring Irene’s ashes today.

We had discussed our desires years ago and both decided that we wanted to be cremated.  I attended the funeral of a friend who was buried at the National Cemetery outside of Eagle Point, OR some years ago.  It is in a rural setting on a hill overlooking a beautiful valley.  Since I am a Vietnam veteran with an honorable discharge, Irene & I can both be interred there.

In 2010, I learned that the cemetery was building a columbarium.  Irene & I decided we would like to be interred in a niche there.  The columbarium was recently completed, and I was notified just before Christmas that I could inter Irene.

It was a perfect “Reene Day”.  We had rain in the morning with afternoon clearing, blue skies and puffy white clouds and a daily high of around 50F.  It was an afternoon that would have found Irene in her garden wearing her grubby garden blue jeans and flannel shirt, both with holes, covered in mud with a big smile on her face.

Given the valiant fight Irene waged with cancer and the life example she set for many, it is only fitting that she rest in a field of heroes as she is a heroine to many.

Rebuilding and Remembering

A good friend has sent me the four book series from the Stephen Ministry entitled Journeying Through Grief over this past year. I received the last book a few days before flying to Scottsdale for Christmas. The title of the book is the title of this post. The books are quick reads, but I did not have time to read it and prepare for the trip; so, I took it with me and read it while waiting for my plane


Book four talks about something that anyone who has lost someone that made them whole and now feels that a part is missing instinctively knows but does not realize - you have lost the physical person, but the relationship continues, just in a different form. Irene and I will always be together. Little pieces of her are scattered all over the world, and I encounter them at unexpected times and in unexpected places. I walked into the guest bathroom in Scottsdale, and the Southwest style cow skull stained glass night light that Irene made as a gift was there. I had forgotten about it.


So, as this Christmas approaches, we will celebrate it together - just in a different way. A part of a poem by Henry Scott Holland entitled "What is Death?" was quoted in the last of the Stephen Ministry books, and I will end this rambling with that quote.


"I have only slipped away into the next room.
I am I and you are you.
Whatever we were to each other, that we still are."


Merry Christmas Irene.

Haiku #32

They say firsts are hard.

Thanksgiving I remember

and put hard aside.

Haiku #31

Irene Ware - Your name

listed with the others lost

this All Saints Sunday.