One week. 7 days. So much change in so few days. It hits me most at night when I’m trying to get to sleep. Good memories, bad ones, what-if’s, maybe’s, what I need to do.

Christian picked up David’s ashes from the funeral home yesterday. In case I haven’t mentioned it, David had a very quirky sense of humor. He told his sister, Kelly, that when he died, he wanted his ashes spread on Medicine Lake down in the cities. That’s where they grew up, and he would go fishing there. He told her that it was so toxic that he would probably come back. So part of his ashes are going to Kelly, who has said she’s going to put some of them in the back yard with Connie, their sister who died a couple of years ago. The other part of his ashes are going into a container, and this summer, money permitting, I’m going to go out west with Lukas and my nephews. David was afraid of heights, which I didn’t know when we went on our honeymoon. We went out to Yellowstone on motorcycles, and I took him over Beartooth Pass. I love the mountains, but it was the worst place I could have taken him. It took 15 years to get him to go back out west again, and then we went through the Big Horns in Wyoming, and the brakes overheated on the way down. He absolutely refused to go after that. So when I drive through the mountains in my RV, his ashes are going to be on the dash, and I can say he went to the mountains with me and wasn’t afraid of my driving.

My sister told me that even though there wouldn’t be a viewing, to take some of his favorite clothes along with to the funeral home when we went there to make arrangements last week. I was going through the closet to find a T-shirt, and came across one, and thought he would have loved to give someone one last laugh. The T-shirt read, ‘I’m really excited to be here.’

See, his sense of humor rubbed off on me. That’s the part I missed so much of these last few years.

But life goes on. I’m finding little freedoms. Living with an alcoholic is being in a prison, no matter how nice the person seems to be to others. Enough said.

Lukas is doing OK. He misses David, but he has so many friends at the Kingdom Hall who care for him. I do too. Christian is the one I worry about. He’s too much like me, at heart a hermit. Once spring gets closer, I’ll be able to start getting back to meetings, and I’ll be able to get him to go to the Thursday night meetings. He needs people, no matter how much he thinks he doesn’t.

It’s snowing here. But I’ve got amaryllis bulbs flowering, paperwhites, hyacinths, and my orchid is still blooming. And my birds are busy on the feeders.