It has been a little over two months since Babu passed.  It’s been hard, living here with all of her things, but not her.  Husband and I have been finding moments of joy and some of bittersweetness.  Her birthday is quickly rushing toward me.  It is next month.  It will be a really hard time for us for both reasons obvious and reasons I will not discuss.  Not now anyway.  In the mean time I get caught off guard now and then with moments like these:

Now, there is a story here.  This is her bedroom.  The bed is not quite made the way she liked it…it doesn’t need to be any more.  This space is mostly a hallowed museum at this point.  For now.  But let me tell you about those boots.  I first saw them in high school.  On my future husband’s feet.  I’ve always known they were the boots the airforce issued to his grandfather.  It is more than possible he wore them during World War II.  It is possible he fought the German forces wearing those boots and got shot down over Tunisia wearing them.  It was always wild to me that my husband would wear them, with all that history weighing them down.  He wore them out the other night and when he took them off he put them here.  Those boots have not been in that room for decades, but everything is different now.

The next morning I saw them there.  And it was a sign.  A sign that there is something after death.  That Emily and Jacob are, almost fifty years later, together again.